


A Gentle Ruination

by IceImagines



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: "i can't do that i'm gay", "oohh widowmaker you should teach me how to shoot straight", Awkward Conversations About Feelings, Developing Relationship, F/F, Kissing, Medical Trauma, Missions Gone Wrong, Torture, angela is discussed but doesn't actually appear, chaotic good sombra, everyone at talon is a dick, fairly intense dehumanization of widow fair warning there, i guess?, i love moira but she's horrible in this don't read if ur a moira stan, i'd tag this as slow burn but it only has 7 chapters and an epilogue, more or less, sombra's cyberneticist is awesome she's german her name is lilli, they're both gay idiots, this is already finished i'm uploading it piece by piece now, widow's hair as a metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-04-30 11:06:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14495592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceImagines/pseuds/IceImagines
Summary: Widowmaker was faceless to Sombra for the longest time, nameless like every other Talon soldier she had ever had the displeasure of meeting. The blue of her skin and her pretty face made her only marginally more interesting, not enough to make her anything but a project Sombra could busy herself with when she got bored of her assignments. Another code to decrypt, a mystery to solve.But it's easy to stumble when you're tiptoeing around a gaping abyss of a woman. It's easy to let your eyes linger where they don't belong. It's easy to find yourself falling, and when the time comes, the rush may well make you forget that you are going to hit the ground.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> oh boy, here we go again. i wrote this over the course of maybe three months, i don't even know what happened there. this is the first multichapter story i ever finished and i don't know how coherent it is, i apologize in advance. like i mentioned in the tags, this story is completely done already, so you'll hopefully get a somewhat consistent upload schedule! right now i'm looking at between one and two weeks between chapters, we'll see how it works out. 
> 
> again, in this story, widow is dehumanized very intensely and explicitly by higher ranking talon members, so if that's not something you're comfortable with, you might consider skipping this one. in later chapters, there's fairly explicit descriptions of torture and medical trauma, i will, however, put warnings before the chapters this concerns.
> 
> disclaimer, my french is limited and i don't speak any spanish, but the lovely rosi aka cyclops was kind enough to help me out with that, so there shouldn't be any glaring mistakes.
> 
> i'm available on tumblr as icewuerfelchen, i'm always open for discussions about gay murderers or anything really, come talk to me if you'd like! 
> 
> enjoy the ride ~

It was a fair assumption to say that Sombra had seen a lot of shit in the thirty years of her life. 

A lot was an understatement, actually. When she thought about it, her life had been about 90 percent just condensed shit up until this point. She knew the darkest secrets of the human race. She knew that people were horrible, and the things they were capable of even more so. After almost three decades spent on the run and depending entirely on her ability to use those secrets for her benefit, Sombra didn‘t have any illusions left about there being genuine good in the world. It didn‘t have anything to do with pessimism. She just saw things as they were. It wasn‘t always pretty, but it was the only way to make it in the world they lived in. 

So she assumed that people would have to try a lot harder than they presently did to cook something up that would genuinely shock her. Something that would make her stop in her tracks and squeeze her throat shut with utter terror at what she had just witnessed. 

She was wrong. 

Almost as wrong as she was when she thought that she knew what she was dealing with when she joined up with Talon. Her plan said to use the infamous terrorist organization primarily as a means to get invaluable intel, and also to protect herself from others who would probably love nothing more than to see her dead. So far, so good. It wasn‘t hard to get them to accept her into their ranks. They evidently lacked any good IT personnel, their systems were positively ancient, their firewall practically useless against anyone with even moderate hacking skills.

(„You would‘ve thought an organization as large and powerful as you guys had invested a little more resources into protecting itself“, she chided in Reaper‘s direction while she updated Talon‘s cyber-defenses with one of the nifty little programs she had on her internal computer. Reaper growled something indiscernible. He wasn‘t a very talkative fellow.)

Thus, hacking their servers was almost too easy. And once Sombra was in, she left several backdoors open for herself to reenter any time she wanted. She went through their files in her off-time, skimming through most of them only half interested, but storing them away in her secure store anyway. You never knew when they might become useful, and Sombra never let an opportunity go to waste. Not even when that opportunity was mainly dull mission reports and files on masses of agents that seemed to all be more or less them same person. When Sombra encountered them in the hallways, they certainly seemed like they had forgotten how to think for themselves a long time ago. It made them easy to manipulate, but also boring to be around. 

There were precisely two people at Talon‘s Venice headquarters that didn‘t fit that mold to perfection. Those two people were unfortunately also extraordinarily opposed to befriending Sombra or spending any time with her when it wasn‘t strictly necessary. 

Not that she should have expected anything else from Reaper, a man whose body was mainly made up of nanobots and whose mind was mainly made up of hatred for the ex-commander of Overwatch, and Widowmaker, who was presently the most wanted assassin in the world and Talon‘s best sniper, and also rumored to be physically incapable of feeling emotion. That didn‘t stop Sombra from trying, though. If only because attempting to get the two of them to admit they secretly loved her was damn near the only fun thing she got to do these days. 

That also meant she looked at their files with a little more attention than the rest of them. Reaper‘s was interesting in parts - especially how Talon‘s scientists managed to keep him alive. His body had been completely torn apart by the explosion of Overwatch‘s Swiss headquarters. He was less alive than Darth Vader had been after falling into that lava pit. It intrigued Sombra, at least to a degree, but she didn‘t really know much about nanobiology and a lot of the terminology went far over her head. 

So she turned her attention to Widowmaker.  
When she was honest with herself, Widowmaker was a whole lot more interesting than Reaper. His motivations were so infuriatingly obvious. Of course he never talked about Jack Morrison or his past with Overwatch, but Sombra barely needed her hacking skills to know what was really going on beneath that overly spooky mask that usually just made her laugh instead of intimidating her. Even though he hid behind his persona and his ridiculous getup maybe more than any of them, to Sombra, he was an open book.

Widowmaker was the precise opposite of that. Every day that Sombra spent in her company she understood more just how little she actually did understand about the woman. Normally, she was very good at reading people, at twisting their secrets out of them without ever laying a hand on them. But she hadn‘t gotten one step closer to deciphering the beautiful sniper since the day she‘d arrived at the Venice headquarters. Had the object of her attention been anyone else, maybe Sombra would have gotten frustrated sooner or later and abandoned the little project she‘d found in her. But Widowmaker fascinated her far too much for that. She brought an element of excitement back into Sombra‘s life that she had been sorely missing since her employment with Talon. 

No, Sombra was not giving up yet. Not by a long shot. 

\----------------

Encountering Widowmaker in the kitchen first thing in the morning had become something of a ritual for Sombra during the two, maybe three months of her alliance with Talon. The assassin sometimes was there even before Sombra, which was remarkable enough considering that Sombra barely slept and usually woke up from no more than four hours of fitful slumber before sunrise. Then she dragged herself into the kitchen in her old, worn pajamas and an oversized hoodie and downed several cups of coffee before she was awake enough for basic conversation again. 

But Widowmaker usually made her perk up as soon as she came in, when she most likely would have caused the opposite reaction in most other people. Sombra felt a wide grin spread out over her features as she watched the sniper walk past her without so much as a „good morning“. Watching her move was always a joy all in and of itself. She always seemed to be in complete and utter control of every muscle, her movements precise and elegant at the same time, not unlike some kind of predator. The spider that was tattooed onto her back seemed to watch Sombra with its red hourglass eye sometimes. 

„ _Buenos días, araña._ “ Sombra‘s voice was still slightly husky from sleep. The grin had not left her face, and it did not diminish at the cold glance Widowmaker threw her over her shoulder while she opened the cupboard to get herself a mug. She didn‘t grace Sombra with an answer, but the hacker wasn‘t insulted. She wasn‘t used to any degree of politeness from Widowmaker. 

„Sleep well?“, she tried again nonetheless.

Silence.

„I mean. If you even sleep at all.“ Sombra inclined her head in thought. „Would explain how you always look like _that_ in the morning.“ By which she meant perfectly put together, with not a hair out of place, a wrinkle in her plain clothing, a single trace of tiredness in her yellow eyes. In comparison, Sombra probably looked like she had slept in a trashcan. Not that it bothered her.

She leaned forward over the table a little and watched as Widowmaker walked over to the coffee maker and operated it with military precision, like she was honing in on a target with her sniper rifle instead of pressing a few buttons on the old and often malfunctioning apparatus to make it spit out half-decent black coffee. Sombra couldn‘t decide whether it was fascinating or frustrating. 

Still, for a while, she was content just watching Widowmaker from her spot at the small table, idly stirring the contents of her mug with a slightly twisted spoon. She could barely see her face from here, but she had memorized it over the past few months. Sombra knew her skin‘s exact shade of icy blue, the purplish shimmer it took on in certain lighting. She knew the narrow eyes of molten gold. She knew the slim, just slightly upturned nose. She knew the prominent cheekbones, sharp enough for Sombra to be fairly sure that she would leave a trail of blood should she be courageous enough to reach out and trace them with her fingertips. 

She also knew the way her muscles moved beneath the cold skin, the sheen of that hair that Sombra had never seen loose a single time. It almost reached Widowmaker‘s knees even when pulled back into her signature high ponytail. Sometimes Sombra wondered whether Talon had bothered to have it cut a single time since...

Since whatever had occurred that had transformed Widowmaker into what she was today. 

Her files happened to be the only ones on Talon‘s main server that were even halfway decently encrypted, and they were split up into different sections that each utilized a different unique code. Sombra had put one of her neat little programs on the job, but it wasn‘t anywhere near through yet. And for some reason that Sombra wasn‘t sure about, she enjoyed the suspense of not knowing. Probably for the first time in her life. Not that she didn‘t still want to find out what had happened to Widowmaker, and why she was so... well, blue. 

But Sombra had fun trying to coax the sniper‘s secrets out of her by hand, so to say. She had not been exceptionally successful up until this point, but giving up so soon simply wasn‘t her style. 

And besides, she was fairly sure that most regular Talon agents would have gotten shot by now for being so nosey and presumptuous as Widowmaker undoubtedly perceived Sombra to be. The fact that Sombra was still alive and well, to her, was proof that her beautiful colleague couldn‘t hate her _entirely_. Hating her a little was fair, but evidently not enough to put more effort into stopping her from sticking her nose where others tried to tell her it didn‘t belong. 

„Stop staring.“ The hissed words cut through the silence like a hot knife, the first ones Widowmaker had spoken since entering the kitchen. Sombra didn‘t flinch, didn‘t even so much as blink. 

„Now, why would I do such a thing?“ She deliberately let her eyes roam over Widowmaker‘s body for another moment, fully aware that the other woman knew despite having her back turned to Sombra. 

„Gotta enjoy the view while I can, no?

The coffee maker ceased its whirring. Widowmaker snatched up her cup of coffee, turning around to face her. „Why must you insist on being so insufferable at all times?“

Sombra‘s grin had returned. „Ah, _arañita_. You wound me.“ She placed her hand over her heart, feigning shock. „I am not insufferable.“

„Yes, you are.“

„Nah. I‘m just the only person in this place who isn‘t either a cardboard cutout version of a black OPS soldier, an angry nanite cloud or... well...“ She gestured towards Widowmaker, who huffed in disdain. 

Sombra leaned forward over the table a bit. „Is that... irritation I detect in your voice, dear spider?“ 

Widowmaker didn‘t answer, just held Sombra‘s purple gaze with her golden one. Sombra took that as affirmation.

„What would your revered Talon officials think if they knew that their little pet project was capable of something like _that?_ “ She wiggled her finger with its neon pink claw-like nail in false disapproval. „Aren‘t you supposed to feel, like, nothing?“

Several seconds passed until Widowmaker spoke. 

„Are you threatening me?“ 

Her voice was soft, flat, completely devoid of emotion. Even the trace of anger that Sombra had thought she had heard before had vanished entirely. 

Still, she had enough experience with people to know what she was dealing with. Widowmaker had asked whether she was being threatened, but in truth she was the one who was threatening Sombra. The hacker knew that she had strict no-kill orders for most higher-standing Talon officials, including Reaper and all members of the Council. Sombra was not among those people. Widowmaker could have snapped her neck right now and all it would have earned her would have been a few disapproving glances. 

By all means, Sombra should have been scared. But the shiver that she felt running down her spine was not one of fear. 

She bit her lower lip to stop the smile from spreading across her features. She did not feel tired anymore. 

„Think for a moment, spider. What reason would I have for blackmailing you? I deal in information. There‘s nothing you could offer me in exchange for me not revealing your secrets.“ 

Nothing Talon wouldn‘t find out about. Nothing that wouldn‘t land Widowmaker in reconditioning and Sombra dead in a gutter somewhere. 

Barely, just barely, Widowmaker‘s muscles began to relax. Had Sombra not been watching her as closely as she was, she would not have noticed at all. The sniper‘s stance had not shifted by more than a few millimeters. 

She parted from the kitchen counter after a few more moments, still clutching her cup of coffee like her life depended on it, and made for the door with long, almost hurried strides. As she passed Sombra‘s table, she halted for a moment, and leaned over just a little bit, just enough for her low whisper to be audible. 

„Be careful where you let your eyes linger too long, _petit ombre._ “ 

Then she was gone, with no trace left that she had ever been there except for Sombra‘s pulse, sped up ever-so-slightly, and that smile she finally stopped biting back. 

She didn‘t speak French, not really, but it was similar enough to Spanish for her to understand what Widowmaker had called her. 

„We‘ll see if you‘re not underestimating your little shadow after all, araña“, she murmured to herself as she drank more of her slowly cooling coffee. 

\----------------

That evening, she sat holed up in her room, knees drawn tightly to her chest and her chin resting on top of them, the only source of light the purple glow that her holographic screens emitted. 

For once in her life, her hands were still. She wasn‘t tapping away at some keyboard or touchscreen, wasn‘t attempting to cracking an uncrackable code, wasn‘t sneaking into places where the keepers didn‘t want her and yet couldn‘t stop her from entering. 

She was watching old ballet recordings on the internet.

If there was one thing that Sombra could say for sure that she had never done once in her life, it was probably that. She‘d never been a particularly good dancer, or very interested in the subject, for that matter. If she tried, she cut a dashing enough figure on a club‘s dance floor, but that had less to do with skill and more with the glowing skeleton tattoos all over her body that became visible under black light. 

Ballet, though? No. Not her. It was all too stiff, too strict, the rules too many and the movements too coordinated, too perfect. 

The reason why, still, she had spent the last two hours sitting here, motionless, eyes glued to the screen in front of her, was something she had found in the first part of Widowmaker‘s file when her program had finished the decryption this afternoon. 

It was a name. 

_Amélie._

Amélie Lacroix. 

It was what her project had been called in its early days. PROJECT:LACROIX was strictly confidential in all aspects. Sombra still hadn‘t gotten to the parts that were actually interesting, the ones that detailed what exactly had been done to the woman she now knew as Widowmaker. She also had no idea why the project had suddenly been renamed PROJECT:WIDOWMAKER midway through it. She‘d find out in due time.

For now, though, she was happy running the name through her personal search engine, much more accurate than any public one would have ever been. What it spat out wasn‘t what Sombra had expected, but by now she was getting used to being surprised by everything that had to do with Widowmaker. 

The first search result was a video. _Amélie Lacroix - La mort du cygne (2065)_. The thumbnail made Sombra frown. It showed a pale-skinned woman in a white ballet dress in front of a pitch-black background. When she clicked on it and the music began to play, she abruptly understood what she was dealing with. 

It was the final scene from a French Opera production of The Swan Lake. The dying swan. A solo piece danced by the lead ballerina in the role of Odette, the swan princess. 

Sombra knew nothing about ballet. But she didn‘t have to be able to name the motions the woman on her screen was going through as smoothly as freshly spun silk, or know how much time it had taken to learn them all by heart. She didn‘t need to understand in order to know that she was watching something magnificent, something unique and beautiful enough to stand out even among people of a profession that had devoted itself entirely to beauty in its purest form. 

It wasn‘t just the dancer‘s gorgeous face. There was something in the way she executed the movements, the way they all flowed into each other seemingly effortlessly. She didn‘t need a single word to convey the scene‘s raw emotion, the grief and the exhaustion and the pain. She seemed to emit it with every breath she took. 

It took Sombra a few minutes to realize entirely that this woman was Widowmaker. The face was the same, it obviously was when she paid a little attention, even though her skin was not blue and her eyes pale hazel instead of golden. Still, the difference between the ballerina on Sombra‘s screen and the sniper somewhere in the corridors of Talon‘s Venice Headquarters could not have been more jarring. Widowmaker never showed emotion no matter what, while this woman seemed to be made of it. 

The contrast was utterly fascinating. The more Sombra reminded herself of who she was watching dance right now, the more giddy she felt herself becoming. There was something incredibly exciting about this glimpse into the past. It was like she had opened up a window to a life that Widowmaker had left behind long ago, and was now peering through it, unnoticed as always. 

So she kept clicking on more and more videos, some from the same ballet, some from others, although she admitted that Amélie‘s performance as Odette‘s evil counterpart Odile was particularly striking. It was all acting, of course, but the devilish glint that Sombra saw in her eyes as she danced with the unwitting Prince Siegfried was one she recognized all too well. It was the exact same glint Widowmaker got every time she killed someone. The only time she showed the slightest spark of life. 

It sent chills down Sombra‘s spine. 

She distracted herself by skimming over some old news articles about Amélie Lacroix in the background, picking up facts some of which would definitely be more useful eventually than others. The most interesting parts were certainly the ones from about seven years ago. The famous ballerina had been reported missing, and on the very same day her husband, a man named Gérard Lacroix, had been found dead in his bed, his throat slit in his sleep. Some more digging revealed that Gérard had, in fact, been working for Overwatch before his untimely death. 

Sombra‘s brow furrowed. This piece of information gave things an entirely new spin. Widowmaker had been married to an Overwatch agent before her... transformation. An agent who had then been killed under mysterious circumstances. And his wife had vanished without a trace immediately afterwards. 

It wasn‘t difficult do to the math with the intel Sombra already possessed. Either Widowmaker had been working for Talon all along and had willingly betrayed her husband‘s allies for them... or Sombra‘s earlier suspicions were confirmed. That she was not here of her own free will at all. It was not a far-fetched assumption to make, although nobody had bothered to explain anything about her new colleague to Sombra when she had joined the team. Sombra couldn‘t really imagine anyone choosing to have their skin turned blue and their emotions literally switched off. 

A feeling started to settle in her gut that she didn‘t like at all. It took her a few more ballet videos until she could identify it properly. 

It was worry. She wasn‘t entirely sure why she felt it. It must have been years since she had last had reason to. She didn‘t enjoy it. It was a loss of control over herself that Sombra resented more than anything else. 

And besides, she really didn‘t have anything to worry about, not as long as she kept her little research project hidden away from Talon. Not as long as they didn‘t decide to do to her whatever they had done to Widowmaker. 

She was as safe as she could be, holed up here in her room, surrounded by her screens and the darkness and nothing else. 

\----------------

A week or two later, Sombra was notified of a mission she had been assigned to that would take place the next day, at a secluded factory which produced chemical weapons that Talon had taken an interest in. Sombra could not possibly have cared less about the mission‘s objective, but at least right now, her alliance with Talon was a mutually beneficial deal. They offered her protection and access to information she would have had a hard time getting at otherwise, while she agreed to manage most of their cyber affairs and help them on their little terrorist attacks. 

At least it meant a chance to get out of the cramped and rather dull compound of the Venice HQ. It had been a while since Sombra had been able to properly stretch her legs and run. And all that expensive tech she‘d had installed had to be good for something. She hoped she wouldn‘t get sick from the translocating again. It had been too long since she‘d used it. 

She was given the remainder of the day to prepare herself for the assignment and spent most of it actually doing as she was told for a change. With extensive amounts of nachos and overly sugary soda as nourishment, she cracked the factory‘s main server, familiarized herself with the local security, escape routes, troops stationed there. The people in charge of the organization had obviously taken great pains to secure their projects as much as possible, but their best efforts were as good as useless against Sombra. 

Not that she would actually have a lot to do once she and the others reached the site. All she was supposed to do was get into the core facility along with Reaper and acquire the most important files on the chemicals Talon was interested in. Widowmaker would be providing sniper support all throughout the mission. It was supposed to be over in a matter of a few hours. Sombra had to admit that she‘d been on much more difficult assignments. This one seemed like it would be a right walk in the park compared to that. It reminded her a little of the stunts she‘d used to pull with Los Muertos, and the thought almost made her _melancholic_ for a moment before she forced herself to snap out of it. Those days were over, and she had to focus on the objective at hand. 

It was already getting dark outside when she decided to give herself a break and catch some fresh air. Staring at computer screens all day hardly exhausted her cybernetically enhanced eyes anymore and the neural implants had expanded her mind‘s capacity for processing information so much that she was almost incapable of being overwhelmed by too much data. But even the most advanced tech couldn‘t do anything to cure the itch that Sombra got after sitting still too long, the urge to get up and move and _breathe._

So she let her footsteps lead her to the flat roof of the headquarters. It was chilly outside and she buried her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket as she slowly made her way over to the edge. There was no railing to keep people from falling off - or jumping - but Sombra wasn‘t bothered by that. Her sense of balance was reliable enough. 

She settled down on the cold concrete, letting her legs dangle over the roof‘s edge and exhaling slowly. There were no stars visible on the night sky above her, the city‘s lights had scared them away. Even at this hour of the day, it was still alive and wide awake. Sombra could feel it buzzing with electricity. It was like a constant humming in the back of her skull. If she looked closer, she could see, or rather feel the countless electronic pathways, the connections, electrons racing back and forth, cables and wires heated up with the strain of the incredible amounts of data being forced through them. It was all there at the tips of her fingers. Had she wanted to, she could have reached out, taken hold of it and ripped it into pieces in a heartbeat. The residents of Venice didn‘t know it, but their greatest threat was right here in front of them, in the shape of a small woman in purple on the edge of a concrete block‘s roof. 

The thought brought a smile to Sombra‘s lips. Even Talon had no idea of powerful she actually was. She had not let them in on all she was capable of with her cybernetic enhancements, but even if she had, she doubted that they could have grasped what it all meant. They thought themselves dangerous with their bullets and their bombs and all of their other ancient methods of warfare, but all of that was miniscule compared to what Sombra could do with a snap of her fingers. 

She loved it. 

That smile still on her face, she hummed an indiscernible little tune to herself and thought of all the things she‘d be able to do with the data she was stealing right from under Talon‘s nose once she was done with them. Her affiliation with the infamous terrorist organization was always meant to be temporary. Once she had what she wanted, she‘d get out and bring them down with her. The world would thank her for it. 

She didn‘t realize that she wasn‘t alone anymore until the other person already stood right behind her, and even then all that alerted Sombra to their presence was the distinct noise of someone softly and very disapprovingly clearing their throat. She flinched sharply and whipped her head around, her hand already flying to the machine pistol at her waist, until she suddenly recognized who her visitor was. 

„Shit, _araña._ “ She exhaled with a laugh, relaxing and letting go of her weapon. „Startled me there for a second.“ 

Widowmaker stared at her with a blank expression on her face. She wasn‘t wearing a jacket, just her usual off-duty tank top and black pants. Except for the ridiculous catsuit she ran around in on missions, Sombra had never seen her in anything else. She was pretty sure by now that Widowmaker did not own any other clothes. 

„What are you doing here?“ 

Her voice was flat as usual, the only trace of personality added to it by her rather thick French accent. Her vague heritage had been the only thing Sombra had known about her as a person before she‘d started reading her file. Of course, now she knew that she was specifically from Annecy in Northern France. But Widowmaker didn‘t need to know that she knew. Yet. 

Sombra returned her gaze unwaveringly. „I could ask you the same thing.“

Widowmaker‘s expression turned just slightly sour. It was enough to bring Sombra‘s ever-present grin back. 

„What, did I interrupt your daily brooding session? Do you come up here to crouch on the roof all dark and mysterious like you‘re Batman or some shit?“

It took a few seconds until she replied. „What is a Batman?“ She almost sounded uncertain. 

Sombra burst out laughing. „ _Mierda, chica,_ did you not have childhood?“ She shook her head. „What do I know. Maybe old comic books just weren‘t fancy enough for you people.“ 

Still grinning, she patted the concrete next to her. „Have a seat, if you‘re here already.“

When Widowmaker didn‘t move, Sombra rolled her eyes. „Come on, I‘m not going to tell anyone. Geez, I knew they kept you on a tight leash, but this is ridiculous.“

That seemed to do it. Widowmaker stepped next to her and slowly lowered herself onto the ground, her movements oddly stiff and controlled for such a mundane action. Still, it was something. A small victory, but it counted. 

For a short while, they sat there in silence, not looking at each other. Sombra couldn‘t decide whether it felt uncomfortable or not. But she didn‘t have the chance to talk to her mysterious teammate alone very often. She resolved to use it while she could.

„So“, she broke the silence, eyes focused on the city beneath them, „ballet, huh?“ 

Widowmaker turned her head in Sombra‘s direction. Her golden eyes almost seemed to glow, cat-like, in the half-light on the roof. „ _Quoi?_ “ 

Sombra raised her nicked eyebrows. „I did some research, araña. Turns out you used to be more of a swan than a spider.“ 

She watched Widowmaker‘s face closely as she spoke, searching for a reaction, any sign that her words had moved the sniper at all. At the word „swan“, she could have sworn she saw Widowmaker‘s eyes widen for a fraction of a moment. 

„How did you find out about that?“, she hissed. She sounded like she was purposely trying to keep her voice down. Sombra made a mental note of it. 

„I‘m a hacker, _princesa._ “ She snapped her fingers, letting some purple sparks fly. „Finding things out is what I do.“ 

Widowmaker looked like she was going to say something. But she remained silent. The corners of her mouth were tensed up, her brow furrowed ever-so-slightly. She was angry. Or at least mildly irritated. Sombra did an internal little victory dance. 

„Don‘t act so shocked.“ She was unable to keep the glee out of her voice. „It‘s not as if I‘ve never done something Talon wouldn‘t approve of before.“

Widowmaker had been there for Volskaya. She and Reaper both knew that Sombra had botched the mission on purpose, and Sombra knew that they knew. She didn‘t care as long as they didn‘t snitch. Reaper wouldn‘t, she was sure of that. She hadn‘t been as sure about Widow at first, but the sniper had kept her mouth shut. When Sombra had realized that, she had gained more than a little respect for Widowmaker, and the notion that maybe she wasn‘t as blindly loyal to Talon as its officials liked to believe. 

Now she said, very quietly: „I know.“ 

Sombra leaned towards her a little. „So what‘s your issue, spider? Ashamed of your old hobby?“

„It was _not_ a hobby“, she spat out. The sudden anger in her voice was almost enough to make Sombra flinch. Almost. She remained silent, watching Widowmaker intently, waiting. 

Finally, the sniper spoke again. „You are not supposed to know these things.“

„Why not?“

„They do not matter anymore.“

„Why not?“

„Stop it.“ The harshness had returned to Widowmaker‘s tone. „If you do not stop sticking your nose into other people‘s matters constantly, you will come to regret it bitterly, Sombra.“ 

Sombra pouted for a minute. She had almost felt like she‘d found some sort of connection to the sniper, but now all of her walls were up again. Maybe she was so fixated on making some kind of progress on the little project she‘d made out of Widowmaker that she‘d started to overestimate her own charm. Not exactly a thought she liked having.

She stared down at the cars racing by on the street far beneath her feet again. They looked like nothing more than children‘s toys from up here. To her, they were. 

Finally, she spoke up again.

„You were good, you know.“ 

Widowmaker didn‘t seem to understand. Sombra sighed. 

„I watched some videos of your old performances.“ She shrugged a little. „I don‘t really know anything about dance, but you looked like you really knew what you were doing. And most of the commentators agreed that you were the best Odette in several decades, so...“ 

_You were beautiful. You still are._

She didn‘t say that aloud. 

Widowmaker‘s reply came so softly she almost didn‘t hear it. „ _Merci._ “ 

Sombra had not been expecting that. She struggled for words for several heartbeats. „ _De nada_ , spider“, she got out eventually. 

They did not speak anymore after that. It was alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some translation stuff:
> 
> "buenos días, araña" - "good morning, spider"
> 
> "petit ombre" - "little shadow" (as mentioned)
> 
> "la mort du cygne" - "the dying swan" (well literally it's "the death of the swan" but the piece is called that in english)
> 
> "mierda" - "shit"
> 
> "de nada" - "you're welcome"
> 
> this is the piece amélie is dancing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3GAjAKges


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm back! there's been a lot of incredible encouraging feedback on the first chapter of this, so i'm even more happy than i would otherwise be to share this second one with you :) this chapter was changed and edited a lot, while i was still working on it and even after the story had already been mostly finished, so if you run across any inconsistencies, it might be that i've overlooked something while editing. in that case, i'd ask you to point it out to me so that i can fix it!
> 
> there's a lot of minor character death and some injuries and vomiting in this chapter, fair warning there. also a lot of pretty strong language - sombra swears like a sailor in this chapter especially.
> 
> enjoy!

„ _Shit!_ “

Sombra just barely managed to throw herself to the side as rapid machine gun fire from behind her riddled the wall with bullets. It would have riddled her face, too, if she had been even a little bit slower. 

Gritting her teeth, she whirled around, pistol in hand, and emptied the magazine at the guard who had tried to shoot her. He collapsed to the floor with a scream. She didn‘t stop to check whether she had killed him or not, instead turning round on her heel and continuing to sprint down the hallway as fast as she could with the strength she had left. Her breath already came in hard, short bursts, her lungs burning terribly. Her legs ached with every step. A bullet had grazed her side earlier. There was blood seeping through her jacket and the overall beneath it. It hurt, a lot. But Sombra could do nothing but do her best to ignore it. 

This mission was turning into a right disaster very, very fast. It had all seemed so easy when they had gone over the plan one last time in the drop ship. Get Widowmaker to the vantage point, let her clear the path of guards, get in with Gabriel, find the server room, snatch their data and a few samples from the laboratory, get out. That was supposed to be it.

The issue? Somehow, and Sombra really had no idea how they had done it, the people at this factory had been expecting them. The second they‘d walked through the front gate, they‘d been welcomed by a much higher number of guards than Sombra had known about, guards with better equipment, and an insulting amount of determination. Widowmaker and Sombra had escaped the first clash unharmed, but Reaper had been shot a few times, and while it wouldn‘t be enough to kill him, he was most definitely incapacitated for the time being.

It was a catastrophe. They‘d requested extraction immediately, but all they had received was a merciless order to continue. As long as they were still standing, they would do everything in their power to get that data, no matter the cost. 

Reaper had still been forced to retreat. He‘d been affected the worst out of the three of them. Now it was just Widowmaker and Sombra, two of them against so many of these, what? Soldiers? Mercenaries? _Goons_ that Sombra couldn‘t count them. Terrible odds even for people like them.

Sombra would have liked nothing more than to scream at Talon where they could shove their stupid little mission and high-tailed it out of this hellhole. But she couldn‘t afford the consequences that would have at the moment. And besides, she really didn‘t want to leave Widowmaker alone in here. These quarters weren‘t made for a sniper, there were no long sight lines, no vantage points for hiding, almost no cover and no escape routes. Sombra could hear her beloved Widow‘s Kiss somewhere behind her, the telltale rattling of its close-range assault mode. Not a good sign. Widowmaker didn‘t usually let people get close enough to her for that to become a necessity. 

As Sombra skittered around the next corner, she suddenly found herself face to face with another guard. He opened fire immediately, and she threw herself to the ground, but still caught a bullet in her shoulder. White-hot pain shot through her body. She couldn‘t suppress the scream that escaped her. For a few moments, she couldn‘t move, lying helplessly on the cold floor, clutching her shoulder with her unaffected hand. Blood seeped through her fingers and covered the electric blue of her gloves. 

„Gotcha.“

The guard‘s triumphant voice made her want to retch. She attempted to push herself up, only to feel the cold metal of the barrel of a gun pressing up against the bare side of her skull. 

„Bet you weren‘t expecting this, were you?“ He chuckled. „Fucking bitch.“ 

„ _Pinche pendejo, hijo de puta..._ “ She muttered a multitude of Spanish insults only vaguely directed at him as her mind raced to find a way to get out of this. Was this how it would all end? Ridiculous. At least she‘d die as she‘d lived.

She had hardly finished the thought when she heard rapid footsteps coming closer, and then a single deafening gunshot ringing out. The barrel dropped from Sombra‘s head as its owner slumped to the ground, blood and a large part of his cerebral matter splattered all over the nearest wall. 

When Sombra looked up, hand still pressed to her shoulder, she found herself staring into Widowmaker‘s golden eyes. She managed to force a grin even as every fiber of her body protested.

„Ha. Knew you liked me, _chica._ “ 

Widowmaker huffed in disdain. She reached out, grabbed Sombra‘s good arm and yanked her to her feet unceremoniously. „ _Ferme ta gueule._ We are out of time.“

„Ugh, like I don‘t know that!“ She attempted to inspect her wound, which proved nigh impossible with all the blood and several layers of clothing in the way. „All of this is a huge fucking pile of fucking shit. Total disaster.“

„ _Oui_ , it is“, Widowmaker growled. Sombra cast her a surprised glance. It wasn‘t like her to express criticism for Talon‘s decisions. _Interesting._

„We still have to get going.“

Ah. There was the obedient soldier she knew. Sombra bit back a deep sigh. 

„Right. Down that hallway, _princesa_.“

They reached the server room without any further incidents, Sombra lightly jogging ahead and Widowmaker following directly behind her, her finger perpetually at her rifle‘s trigger, ready to fire at anything that moved. One well-placed bullet to the door‘s lock and it sprang open for both of them to slip inside. 

It was almost completely dark except for a few computer screens that cast a cold white light onto the desks and the floor. Sombra immediately felt better. This was her realm. This was what she knew, what she was comfortable with. Here, she was the one in control. 

She grit her teeth against the pain in her shoulder and her side, knowing full well she was in for a few very painful weeks after this, and dropped into the chair in front of the the nearest server. Finally, they were at the easy part. Sombra could have cracked these firewalls in her sleep.

Widowmaker kept near the door, watching the hallway outside. She had an air of nervousness around her that was entirely atypical for the stoic sniper, and it carried over to Sombra, to a degree. Seeing Widowmaker like this made it even more obvious just how dire the straits they found themselves in was. It was the two of them against dozens, maybe more, the Widow‘s Kiss to defend them both from countless machine guns and who knew what else. And they hardly had any time left. 

Sombra set her pink-clawed fingers on the old-fashioned keyboard and started tapping away at it, hands flying over the keys so quickly it seemed impossible that she knew what she was actually typing. But the results showed almost immediately. The screen went blank white, then black, and then rows and rows of glowing purple code appeared within the darkness.

A smirk tugged at the corners of Sombra‘s mouth. It was all so easy. These machines were her toys, like putty in her hands. She could do anything she wanted. Nobody could stop her. There was nothing Sombra couldn‘t hack. Nothing. 

„Hurry up.“ 

Widowmaker‘s voice from the door sounded clipped and tense, even by her standards. 

„I am hurrying up“, Sombra replied. The next layer of cyberdefenses cracked. „Believe it or not, having a fucking hole in your shoulder is somewhat distracting.“

„And here I was thinking we had hired an internationally feared hacker, not some amateur made useless at the first small inconvenience.“

Sombra cast her colleague an irritated glance, hands not stilling for a moment. „How about you try getting shot, eh, _princesa?_ Bet you wouldn‘t go around clipping every head in your line of sight either anymore.“

„It is not the same.“

„How the hell is it not the same?“

She was almost through. Just a few more seconds and the whole hard drive would be hers. Every little piece of data. Every zero and every one it was made of. 

„ _Merde!_ “ 

A shot rang out, and then another. Screams. Rapid gunfire. 

„ _Chica?_ “ 

Widowmaker stood pressed against the wall next to the door, one eye squeezed shut and the other against her scope. Again, she pulled the trigger. Another scream.

„They have found us.“

„I can hear that!“ 

Sombra felt a tiny trace of fear bubbling up in her her chest. Impossibly, she punched in her commands even faster, her fingers burning. She turned on her own infrared vision made possible by her ocular implants with a thought and cast a hurried glance toward the door. She could see the shapes of at least a dozen more men, all of them firing at Widowmaker.

The sniper was doing everything she could to keep them away from the server room. It was up to Sombra to make use of her stolen time. 

There it was. The last defenses cracked. She breathed a sigh of relief. Now all she had to do was find the files she had been sent here to retrieve. 

It only took her a few more moments, but a few more moments ended up being more than she had. Suddenly, a hail of bullets hit the door, punching through the thin metal. Sombra ducked just in time for them to hit the wall behind her instead of her skull. She whipped her head around, trying to tell if Widowmaker was injured, but the sniper was already firing at the guards again. They were rapidly nearing the door despite Widow‘s bullets. Sombra didn‘t know how they were doing it. She had no idea was going on in this place. She just knew that they had to get out of here, now.

„Sombra! Do you have the files?“

„Almost...“

She hit _download_. The data began to stream into her internal computer, at the same time it was being deleted from the company‘s servers. 

„ _Sombra!_ “ 

A pained yelp sounded from the door. A few drops of abnormally dark blood splattered onto the ground. The next moment, Widowmaker was crouching next to Sombra‘s chair, firing through the open door again and again and again. She looked like she wasn‘t even aiming properly anymore, just hoping her bullets would hit something, anything. 

There was blood all over her right arm. The tattoo, black gothic letters on her pale blue skin, was hardly readable anymore. 

That tiny trace of fear had grown into panic. 

„Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck....“ 

They were almost at the door. Ten more seconds. Widow fired. One of the men dropped dead. The others didn‘t stop. 

Five. Four. They burst into the room, guns blazing. Two more collapsed. It wasn‘t enough to disorient the others for more than a heartbeat. They had seen Sombra and Widowmaker between the rows of desks and computers. The next round of bullets wouldn‘t miss. 

Two... one...

Zero. 

_Download complete._

The guards fired. 

Sombra saw the bullets tearing through the few dozen meters that separated the men from her and Widow as if in slow motion. She reacted instinctively, without thinking. 

In a heartbeat, she threw herself off her chair, reaching for Widow. Her arms wrapped around her waist a split second before she activated the translocator she‘d placed in the drop ship before the mission. 

They disappeared in a blaze of violet, both of their silhouettes dissolving into glowing pixels an instant before the bullets could hit and kill them both.

\----------------

Sombra felt the shock of the displacement rip through her when they rematerialized in the ship. It really had been too long since she‘d used a translocator. The pain wasn‘t nearly as bad as it had used to be when she‘d started out with the tech, but it was still considerable.

For Widowmaker, though, it obviously was a thousand times worse. Her atoms had barely fully reassembled themselves when she doubled over, dropping her rifle and clutching her chest where her heart was, eyes wide. A single agonized groan escaped her lips, even though the displacement must have ripped most of the oxygen out of her. 

Sombra‘s arms had still been wrapped around her, but she let go when she felt the violent shaking that could only mean one thing. Instead, she made sure Widow‘s abnormally long ponytail didn‘t get in the way and lightly held her by the shoulders as she heaved up the few contents of her stomach. It couldn‘t be much more than stomach acids, by the looks and smell of it. Did they give her anything to eat? 

„There, there, _princesa_ “, Sombra murmured, still shaking off her own dizziness. „Happens to everyone. You‘ll feel better in a minute, I promise.“

She had hoped to be able to hold off on talking to Gabriel until Widow had regained some of her composure, but once more, her hopes were disappointed. She felt the floor vibrate with the unmistakable heaviness of his footsteps moments before she heard his raspy voice.

„What the hell was that?“ 

She threw him a brief glance over her shoulder, not letting go of Widow, who was still retching and trembling like a leaf. 

„Emergency backup plan. Translocated out of there at the last second.“

„You‘re not supposed to plant these things everywhere at random“, he growled, but Sombra knew him well enough by now to know that he was trying to cover up how relieved he was that both of them were still alive. She flashed him a crooked grin.

„You know me, Gabe. I never go anywhere without leaving a backdoor open.“

He was wearing his mask still, but she felt his eyes on her injured shoulder and side and the blood all over Widow‘s arm. 

„You‘re hurt.“

„Oh, you noticed.“

He was already searching through the medical cabinet for the emergency care kit. 

„It was ridiculous what was going on in there“, Sombra continued. „There were supposed to be no more than thirty, thirty-five men on guard, but we fought at least twice that many. Maybe more.“

„More.“ Widowmaker forced the word out between clenched teeth. She sat up slowly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. „Definitely more.“

„None of this should have happened“, Gabriel grumbled, more or less to himself, as he approached Widow with the kit. But she shook her head. 

„My wound is not very deep. You should see to Sombra first.“

Sombra stared at her incredulously. „You have a bullet lodged in your arm, _chica._ “

She stared back. „My heart only beats about four times a minute. My blood loss is miniscule. I will be fine, I assure you.“

„Excuse me, your heart does _what?_ “

„Why did you think my skin had this color?“

„But-“ 

Gabriel cut her off.

„Shut up, both of you. Sombra, off with the jacket. Let me take a look at your shoulder.“

„Yeah, yeah...“ 

She did as he told her, but as he inspected her injury, her thoughts lingered on Widowmaker‘s words. If what she had said about her heart rate was true, gunshot wounds probably really weren‘t as dangerous to her as they were to other people, but she still had to be in pain. The bullet had hit her dominant arm, the one she pulled the trigger on the Kiss with. By all means, she should have let Gabriel take care of the wound. 

But she had insisted Sombra go first. It was a show of selflessness, and entirely, entirely atypical for Widowmaker. It probably went directly against what Talon had programmed her for - and Sombra was sure by now that she had been programmed in some way. She still had not read her actual medical reports, encrypted as they were, but the introduction to the report on PROJECT:LACROIX was not anymore. Sombra had skimmed over it just a few evenings prior.

It was... unsettling, to put it mildly. 

As it turned out, that persistent rumor that Widowmaker was completely unable to feel emotion was more or less true. At least, she wasn‘t supposed to. Sombra had read something about a microchip inserted in her brain. If that was the case, Widowmaker should not have been able to show altruism any more than she should have been able to show anger, or sadness, or even joy. 

Unless... her tech wasn‘t quite functioning the way it was supposed to. 

Sombra's fingers itched to reach out and trace along Widowmaker‘s temples, where she knew that chip must have been inserted. It didn‘t matter that it wasn‘t digital. If it was an electronic device, Sombra could hack it. She could manipulate it, make it dance to her tune.

She could turn it off.

She did not, though. She sat still on the bench where she was and let Gabriel bandage her shoulder, mumbling something about the bullet having gone straight through, exiting on the other side. He‘d injected her with a painkiller a minute or two earlier, she could already feel the constant burning from her wounds beginning to dull. 

She hoped he‘d hurry up so he could finally take care of Widowmaker‘s arm. It wasn‘t bleeding anymore, but Sombra hated the way her eyes were still fixated on it, the way she couldn‘t think about anything else than the pain the sniper was in because of her. She had taken that bullet attempting to protect her. And none of this would have happened if Sombra had done her work properly, if she had known about the factory‘s equipment, about the number of guards stationed there...

She shook off the thought. There was no point to falling into self-deprecation because of one small failure. She‘d make up for it. In due time.

\----------------

By the time they arrived back at the base several hours later, Sombra‘s pain was reduced to a dull feeling of discomfort. She was in her leggings and a spare hoodie they‘d found in the drop ship. The top part of her jumpsuit was beyond saving and she‘d have to repair her jacket. It might have looked like nothing more than a slightly too elaborate piece of outerwear, but the truth was that it was a highly complex electronic device that had circuits built into every inch of fabric. It made the thermocloaking possible and the translocating bearable. It was an invaluable part of Sombra‘s kit and she would most definitely not be able to go on a mission without it, but she didn‘t trust Talon‘s scientists as far as she could throw them. She‘d repair her jacket herself, even if it would take a little longer.

She looked down at herself. The hoodie had a tiny version of the Talon symbol stitched onto it. Sombra had to keep herself from giggling at the sight. Sometimes, she thought, Talon seemed to forget that they were actually an international, widely feared terrorist organization, not a moderately successful corporate business that sold, what? Toy guns for children? 

She felt the drop ship shaking slightly as it docked into the hangar, and then its engines dying down, their perpetual vibrations ceasing slowly. With a hiss, the ramp started to come down. Sombra yawned and stretched a little. 

„About time.“ 

Why was she starting to realize how tired she was only now? All that running around and getting shot and almost dying seemed to have taken more out of her than she had thought. Slowly, she pushed herself off the bench she had spent the flight on and traipsed after Gabriel, who was already descending into the hangar. Her leg muscles would be so sore tomorrow, she could already feel them stiffening up. 

Truly, all she wanted was to get to her room and sleep for a few days, but instead she and the other two were welcomed by one of the higher ranking Talon officers, clad in his black uniform with his rank insignia and ridiculously polished boots. He looked the opposite of pleased with the returning team.

A scowl settled on Sombra‘s face. „ _Estoy muy cansada para esto_ “, she mumbled to herself. She didn‘t want to deal with this useless henchman‘s accusations of them botching the mission, of the terrible consequences it would all have for Talon. In all honesty, she could not have cared less. 

When the man opened his mouth and started to say something, she cut him off. „Save it, _hombre._ I was shot twice trying to recover your stupid fucking data. You want to bitch at someone, bitch at the bastards at that factory.“

„You were supposed to gather all the necessary intel beforehand!“

„I‘ve got your files, shut up and be happy.“ It wasn‘t a great comeback, but the truth was that the man had hit a sore point by touching on Sombra‘s own failure in all of this. She still couldn‘t understand how those people had managed to outsmart her and it was eating away at her. 

Glowering, she started pushing past the officer and towards the door, but she hadn‘t yet made it very far when angry voices once more started to rise behind her. This time they weren‘t directed at her. When she looked over her shoulder to see what the fuss was all about, she saw the officer closing in on an incredibly tired-looking Widowmaker, the bandage around her arm bloodstained again, leaning partially on Gabriel who had come to her aid. The officer grabbed the injured limb roughly, inspecting it briefly with his brows drawn tightly together in anger.

„How could something like this happen?“, he bellowed. Widowmaker did not return his stare. 

„I was shot by one of the guards.“

„Obviously.“ There was cruel undertone in his voice. He did not let go of her arm. He was probably hurting her, by the looks of it. Sombra grit her teeth, bit back the anger bubbling up inside her. 

„You‘re an asset, Widowmaker“, she heard him tell her. „You exist to fulfill a single purpose. Do you understand that?“

„ _Oui._ “ Her voice had grown very quiet, the single word barely audible.

„Talon made you. Talon owns you. We alone decide what happens to you.“

„ _Je sais._ “

„If you do not fulfill your purpose anymore, there will be no hesitation in replacing you. Never think for a moment that you‘re invaluable, Widowmaker.“

She shook her head a little. The look on her face was one of defeat. Her eyes didn‘t meet those of the officer, her gaze went right through him and towards some invisible point in the distance.

Sombra could not contain herself any longer.

„Hey, _hombre,_ tone it down a little, will you?“ She wandered back towards the three of them slowly. „It‘s not a serious injury anyway, she‘ll be back to normal in no time - no need to get in a hissy fit over it.“

„Agent Widowmaker is none of your concern.“ He didn‘t even look at her. It only served to fuel her anger.

„Like hell she isn‘t. Look, she saved my life in there. Without her, I would‘ve been Swiss Cheese way before I even could‘ve reached the server room.“

Now the officer did turn towards Sombra. His eyes were cold. „You need to learn your place, Agent.“ 

She hated it when they called her that. „I think you need to learn some basic human decency, how about that?“ She moved closer until she stood right in front of him. Her teeth were bared just slightly, like a predator‘s, intimidating its rival. „And I‘m _not_ your _fucking Agent, cabrón_.“

„Sombra.“ Widowmaker sounded alarmed. She wasn‘t supposed to sound alarmed. She wasn‘t supposed to sound _anything._

The officer ignored her completely. „I wouldn‘t be so sure that _she‘s_ human.“

Gabriel had to grab Sombra‘s collar or otherwise she would‘ve jumped at the man and pummeled him with her bare fists, no matter what it might do to her injured shoulder. She was fuming. It had been almost a day since she‘d slept, she had two only partially treated gunshot wounds, and she‘d had one near death experience too many during the last 24 hours. Any patience she might‘ve had for these people had vanished. 

_I wouldn‘t be so sure that she‘s human._

It reminded Sombra too much of the way people like Lumérico had used to talk about her and the other street children back at home. The way they‘d looked at Los Muertos, the only people who had bothered to treat her like she was anything other than a piece of dirt to be trampled beneath some rich bastard‘s heel. 

_Not human. Not human. Not human._

It was all _bullshit_. Humanity wasn‘t something you could just take away with a heap of surgeries and nanites and microchips. You couldn‘t first make someone and then have the audacity to treat them as something low, something dirty, something to kick around and yell at and do with what you pleased. 

It made Sombra so angry. 

„She did nothing wrong, you shitface“, she growled, still being restrained by Gabriel. „Both of us almost died for your stupid little plan! We told you we needed an extraction, but you didn‘t listen to us and now you‘re acting like it‘s our fault, like it‘s _her_ who‘s to blame because she defended me against more than ten men at the same time and she caught _one bullet in her fucking arm-_ “

A cold hand touched her wrist, and her words left her abruptly. When she turned around, Widowmaker was looking at her, and in her eyes there was something dangerously, dangerously close to fear. 

„Stop.“ It was hardly more than a whisper. „You‘re only making it worse.“

Sombra felt her tremble. She returned Widow‘s gaze, her eyes wide. „But he- you... I have to...“

She threw another glance at the officer. The look on his face was one of sheer disgust, and it took her off guard almost more than Widowmaker touching her. 

„Put an end to this, Reyes.“ The words cut like a knife. „You know what to do.“

Gabriel shifted uncomfortably. „I don‘t think that will be necessary-“

„Look at this!“ He gestured sharply towards Widowmaker. „She‘s out of control. End it. Say the words.“

 _Say the words_... Sombra vaguely remembered something from the file. The words, the words, the words...

Trigger words. They had built trigger words into Widowmaker‘s programming. They could make her become docile like a lamb in a matter of seconds just by saying them. She would be completely and utterly at their mercy. 

„Do it, Reyes.“

Gabriel was still wearing his mask, but Sombra could see the way he lowered his head slightly and his posture slumped in resignation. He was going to do as he was told.

Once more, she reacted before she could think about it.

„Oh, no, you don‘t.“ 

She pushed him away from her as he tried to grab her again. „None of you will say any stupid trigger words to anyone.“ 

With a clawed finger she jabbed the officer in the chest. 

„And you will leave Widow the fuck alone, right now. If you had functioning eyes in your head you could see that your goddamn macho trip is freaking her out way more than anything else. Let her go to the infirmary to let that wound be taken care of properly, and then we‘ll forget any of this ever happened.“

He didn‘t seem impressed. „And what are you going to do if I don‘t?“ His tone of voice was almost mocking. Sombra threw caution to the wind.

„If you don‘t“, she said, „I won‘t give you any of those files we stole from the factory. And while I‘m at it, I might... accidentally... _drop_ some classified information about Talon operations in planning. I might even drop it in places where Overwatch might find it.“

That took the man off guard alright. It was several seconds before he answered, very slowly. „Are you trying to blackmail me?“

„Fuck yeah I‘m trying to blackmail you.“ A vicious grin flickered over her face. „It‘s what I do best, _hombre_. Now let Amélie go.“

She heard a sharp intake of breath behind her and realized a second too late what had accidentally slipped out of her.

Now Talon knew she‘d been snooping around on their servers. Not that it should have surprised them. Still not good. 

Sombra did the only thing she could do and stood her ground as best as she could, not breaking the officer‘s gaze for a heartbeat. She hardly even dared to blink. 

Finally, he relented. „Fine“, he rumbled. „Get her to the infirmary, Reyes. Now.“ 

Without another word, Gabriel took Widow‘s arm - her uninjured one - and led her away from the drop ship and towards the hangar‘s exit. Sombra exhaled slowly. It was over, she had done it. Widowmaker would be fine... for now.

She didn‘t spare the officer another glance as she turned around, following after her two colleagues. 

„Don‘t think this is over, Sombra.“ He said it to her back as she left with quick, purposeful strides. 

She pretended not to have heard him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translations: 
> 
> "pinche pendejo, hijo de puta" - "fucking asshole, motherfucker" (basically just babbling insults at this point)
> 
> "chica" - "girl"
> 
> "ferme ta gueule" - "shut up" but a very rude way of saying it
> 
> "princesa" - princess
> 
> "estoy muy cansada para esto" - "i'm too tired for this"
> 
> "je sais" - "i know"
> 
> "hombre" - "man"
> 
> "cabrón" - "asshole" (or something like it)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is me back again with another chapter. i know i said something about consistent updates at the beginning but apparently i'm just shit at those so there ashfjksdhfjhsdjfhdssd. 
> 
> i'm gonna be on vacation for the next two weeks and i will probably have wifi but i'm not like 100% sure, so if you don't hear anything from me, that's gonna be why. 
> 
> in sharp contrast to last chapter, this chapter has been barely edited at all apart from the basics, spelling, awkward sentences etc. i feel like it's not perfect but it has some of my favorite parts of the whole story, and there's difficult moral questions and some shit finally coming to light and lots of ust and our girls becoming a little closer... literally. 
> 
> disclaimer i know jack shit about guns and shooting so if this is bullshit i'm sorry 
> 
> enjoy, and let me know what you think!

The encounter in the hangar stuck with Sombra, even weeks later. It wasn‘t just the new, ever-looming threat of Talon trying to... punish her in some way for spying on them. Sombra knew a thing or two about being watched, she could keep her employers off her back with ease.

No, it was the way in which the officer had spoken to and treated Widowmaker which wouldn‘t leave her thoughts. Before that mission, she had barely seen the sniper interact with anyone other than Reaper and herself. There had never seemed to be any complaints about her work, how could there have been when she never missed, never made a single mistake, fulfilled every order to perfection? 

In the factory that had turned out to be a hornet‘s nest more than anything else, she had made a mistake. Or rather, her performance had not been quite as flawless as it usually was. Sombra didn‘t think catching that bullet in her arm really counted as her having done anything wrong. Most other people would have been hit in the head, or the chest, or something similarly fatal. Multiple times too, probably. Widowmaker had barely been incapacitated for more than a few days, thanks to the superior medical technology Talon had access to. Sombra couldn‘t understand why the officer had been so upset about it. Hell, she had been shot _twice_ and she didn‘t have severely restricted circulation. Nobody seemed to care so hugely about that. (Was she vexed because of that? No. ... well, maybe a little.)

She decided to do what she did best: find out more about it. Find out more about Widowmaker. 

Sombra spent whole evenings and nights combing through every word of the file that was decrypted already, trying to filter out everything helpful that could possibly be read into it. But she was still barely past the introduction. As long as she didn‘t have access to the medical reports, the most insightful bits were kept from her, and she really didn‘t want to admit how much it frustrated her. 

When she tried to ask some of the Talon scientists about it - subtly, of course - she was either met with shrugs, seemingly almost as clueless as Sombra was, a sneer and a „wouldn‘t you like to know!“, or flat out refusal to talk to her. She had known that some of those people didn‘t like her and viewed her as an outsider, an intruder. But this was ridiculous. And it was getting on her nerves. 

Once, she attempted to grill Gabriel about the matter, but he seemed to understand immediately what she was trying to do and brushed her attempts off briskly and, frankly, a bit rudely even by his standards. It was almost enough to insult Sombra, who was usually not so quickly moved by sentiments such as that. 

She had, very briefly, considered asking Widowmaker herself. But something told her that the subject of her interest probably herself didn‘t know everything about what was being done to her. Or if she did, she definitely would not have told Sombra. Maybe she could not have told Sombra. It was a startling thought, but not an implausible one. She was slowly getting the impression that Talon really considered nothing to be beneath them in order to achieve their goals. 

No, it seemed that Sombra would have to go about this problem in a slightly more archaic and definitely more risky way: simple, old-fashioned theft. And not the kind she committed every day on multimillion dollar businesses. 

What she did was sneak into what she had come to call Talon‘s armory in the middle of the night, undetected thanks to her thermocloaking and a few conveniently malfunctioning security cameras. The Armory was a room with a very thick steel door and no windows in the lower levels of the headquarters where potentially dangerous equipment was stored when not in use. 

This included Widowmaker‘s rifle and her recon visor.

Sombra came for the visor, specifically. A few days ago, after practice, she had watched Widow taking it off, and seen for the first time that it was much more than a simple helmet anyone could just put on. Sombra had been wondering for a while what the tiny metal ports on Widowmaker‘s temples were for, but she hadn‘t given it much thought until she had watched the sniper press a button on the visor somewhere yesterday. A quiet whirring sound had come out of it and for an instant, Widowmaker‘s mouth had tensed up as if in pain. When she had lifted the visor off her head, Sombra had just managed to catch a glimpse of the thin silvery wires retracting into its plastic shell. 

Apparently, the visor actually interfaced with Widowmaker directly by inserting those wires through the ports in her temples and most likely connecting them to her brain somehow. Just the thought was enough to make Sombra uncomfortable. Sure, the procedure she had gone through when she had her neural implants installed hadn‘t been much different. But that had been her own decision. To have something like that done to her involuntarily... 

Still, it meant that the visor collected data of some kind. All Sombra had to do was tickle that data out of it like she did with computers so often, and she‘d hopefully be somewhat wiser.

So she stole it. Getting into the Armory was no problem, the lock was electronic. Flitting back to her room through the dark corridors was even easier. Sombra was sure that no one had seen her, and within her own four walls, she was safe. She swept the room every day for bugs, cameras, malware designed to monitor what she did on the physical computers she had set up, and every other kind of spying device she could think of. Sombra‘s room was most likely the only part of the Venice Headquarters that Talon couldn‘t watch whenever they wanted to. She imagined it frustrated them to no small degree, but they really couldn‘t do anything about it. They had known she put heavy emphasis on remaining undisturbed in her work when they had hired her. 

Now, a giddy little feeling bubbled up inside her as she set the visor down on her desk and plopped down into her chair. It was the same feeling she got when she was very close to cracking a code or a firewall she‘d been working on for a long time. She only hoped she wouldn‘t be disappointed by what the visor had to offer. 

She connected it to her internal computer and ordered one of her programs to begin extracting the data. Feet propped up on the desk and a little grin firmly on her face, Sombra watched rows and rows of code race over her multitude of high-quality screens, so quickly that it would have seemed like gibberish even to most conventional programmers. To her, it was as clear as written word. Her internal computer and expanded mindscape helped a lot with those things, but she‘d been fluent in binary and several highly complex coding languages long before she‘d gotten her implants. She‘d been told it wasn‘t normal, that those things should have been impossible for an ordinary human mind, but she didn‘t really care, as long as they allowed her to keep doing what she did. If she‘d gone to school past third grade, maybe she would have been classified as one of those „gifted“ children someday. The kind that attended advanced extra classes and joined competitions and won awards. 

The thought made her grimace. 

It took maybe fifteen minutes for all the recorded data from the past few months to be transferred to Sombra‘s systems. When the download was complete, she started to look through the results immediately, scanning endless rows of text and cyphers with a decidedly nonhuman speed that her eye enhancements allowed her. Within a few minutes, she had estimated that the visor served two main purposes: One, it fed information from the five camera lenses placed around the two that went directly over Widowmaker‘s eyes into her brain, thus making it possible for her to literally see in seven directions at once. Two, it monitored the microchip Sombra had already read about, Widowmaker‘s vitals, and a multitude of nanobots that were found in her slowly flowing bloodstream. Furthermore, it wired all of the information it collected directly to Talon, making it possible for them to watch everything that happened within their sniper in real time. A disturbing thought. 

Unfortunately, as it turned out, most of the more specific data utilized a certain terminology that Sombra was unfamiliar with. She could hardly comprehend any of what she was looking at, and it was frustrating her endlessly. The coding wasn‘t the problem. No, Sombra simply really didn‘t understand nanobiology. Ridiculous for someone like her to fail because of such an obstacle. 

But she had not yet failed, she reminded herself. If she couldn‘t work with what she was being given, then she would just have to utilize other resources. 

Sombra didn‘t like bringing other people into her work, but for the rare event that she had to, she had a folder full of very useful contacts proficient in just about everything ready at all times. Some of those people were _friends_ she had made like she had done with Katya Volskaya, others she had met during her time with Los Muertos. Those were the ones she actually trusted. Well, maybe trusted was a bit of a strong word, but she knew them to be reliable. They were competent, and they never stabbed her in the back or snitched her out. 

Sombra contacted one of them via a short message from her internal computer. She‘d have to bring the visor back before the morning, but that was more than enough time. Her contact never slept at night anyway. 

Still, she was on the edge of her seat for the entirety of the maybe twenty minutes she had to wait until she got an answer - an agreement to help her, thankfully. She swiftly relayed the data to her friend through a secure link, only to promptly realize that this would mean even more waiting until he actually had results for her. 

Sombra sighed deeply and cast the visor on her desk a disgruntled glance, as if it was this piece of plastic‘s personal fault that humans unfortunately didn‘t usually work as quickly as machines did. Sometimes, just sometimes, Sombra was reminded of why she liked to surround herself with computers more than with most people. Strange that a blue-skinned assassin who never felt anything should draw her attention so much. But when Sombra had set her mind on something, she never gave up until she had it. She wanted to decipher Widowmaker, and she would, no matter how much time and nerves it costed her. 

An hour or two before sunrise, her contact sent her the first results of his analysis. _It‘s just an overview,_ he warned her, _if you want me to explain all of that in detail it‘ll take longer._ But she waved him off. That would not be necessary. An overview was, in fact, all she wanted. 

She typed a quick thank you and a promise to wire a little reward into his bank account soon before shutting down the connection and opening the file he‘d sent her. Mentally, she rubbed her hands in glee. 

Suddenly, she was able to comprehend the things the visor had been recording. Her contact had meticulously spelled it out for her in layman‘s terms, there was nothing left to be misunderstood. There was a wide grin on Sombra‘s face when she started reading the file.

The grin started diminishing very soon after, though. It shrunk and shrunk until it had morphed into a frown, and then an expression of profound disgust mere minutes later.

What they had done to Widowmaker was vile. It was the only word to describe the variety of procedures that had apparently been applied to her. The data spelled out clearly every function of that microchip in her brain - her amygdala, to be precise, which was the emotional center, according to Sombra‘s friend. The chip was no larger than a few millimeters, but it had spread its tendrils all the way through large parts of Widow‘s temporal lobe. It appeared to have been there for at least six or seven years of uninterrupted functioning. What it did, exactly, was suppress the brain‘s natural hormone production almost completely, leaving just enough for Widowmaker to function on a basic level. It literally would not allow her to feel emotions. It was not that she didn‘t want or know how to. The ability as a whole had been taken from her. Her brain was almost entirely devoid of the chemicals that caused things such as anger, grief, joy, or fear in other people. An annotation from Sombra‘s contact emphasized how intensely damaging something like that would inevitably be when applied to a human being even for a short time. Having it be in place for almost a decade was unthinkable. 

_„Whoever your friend is, it‘s a miracle they‘re not in a coma yet.“_

The words sent shivers down Sombra‘s metal covered spine as she scrolled down, reading through Widowmaker‘s vitals. 

Her body temperature was kept at just above eighty degrees. Her respiratory rate barely reached the average for adult humans when she was running and jumping around. She had next to no blood pressure. And her heart really did barely beat. The highest value Sombra could find were seven beats per minute. 

Her contact wrote that there were signs that indicated a device implanted close to Widowmaker‘s heart, not unlike a pacemaker, that kept it at this rate. To achieve that effect, her heart would first have to have been stopped entirely. As far as the contact could tell, she was essentially constantly in a state of cardiac arrest. Talon interrupted it just enough for Widowmaker to be able to function with the rest of her augmentations. 

And there was another aspect. The visor also monitored a pair of devices that were only labeled with numbers, but Sombra‘s contact said that they were most likely prosthetics of the lower legs, the kind of expensive high tech ones that connected to the user‘s nervous system and could be controlled through thought like a naturally grown limb. But it went further than that. It seemed that these prosthetics were made of a special kind of muscle fiber that was designed to be able to take much, much more strain that ordinary human muscles could. This aligned with the recordings of Widowmaker‘s movement speed, which was far above normal levels when she was sprinting, despite her body‘s otherwise fragile condition. She also seemed to have taken several falls from great heights and survived with minimal injuries. Sombra‘s contact speculated that the prosthetics‘ material was designed to absorb impact in some way

Apart from that, there were some more specific parts that detailed the composition of Widowmaker‘s blood, which apparently contained extremely high doses of glucose and other nutrients essential for survival that appeared to have been ingested directly instead of through food, as well as armies of tiny nanobots that had spread all throughout her body. There was also a tracking device implanted somewhere that allowed Talon to watch Widowmaker‘s every move even when she was without the visor. But that hardly surprised Sombra anymore at this point. 

She kicked her chair away from her desk a little and let her body slump forward, burying her face in her hands, half in exhaustion, half in an attempt to process everything she had just read. It had always been obvious that some kind of heavy tampering had to have been done with Widowmaker‘s body. The unusual color of her skin alone was proof enough. 

But this was more than even Sombra had expected. She lifted her head and tilted it back instead, staring at the ceiling, pitch black except for the faintest trace of a violet shimmer from the holoscreens that were still open. When had the air in this room become so goddamn stuffy and hot? 

Every last byte of Sombra‘s artificially expanded mindscape was dedicated to attempting to figure out what to do next, but try as she might, she couldn‘t find a solution. _Madre de Dios_ , she was no saint, she had done her share of evil in her lifetime - she had lied, stolen, cheated, committed an arson or two, and yes, she had killed before. To say it had left her completely cold would have been a lie, but so would have been claiming it haunted her dreams to this day. A childhood like hers tended to leave people with a certain pragmatism that was invaluable if one wanted to survive. 

But in spite of all of this, Sombra liked to tell herself that she was not, at her core, a bad person. She was selfish and she knew it, she needed to be or else she would have died years ago during La Medianoche home in Mexico. The main reason she pursued her goals was her personal obsession with the Conspiracy that had ruined her life. But she also did it because she believed the organization was a genuine threat, a threat to everyone on this godforsaken planet. And so were corporations like Lumérico. Sombra had seen what happened to people who were forgotten about and left to rot in a gutter somewhere. She had seen hell before she had started losing her baby teeth and so had thousands of other children, all because those people on their self-styled Olympus had decided they weren‘t worth their precious time, not even to make sure they weren‘t dying in the streets of cold and hunger and disease and everything that could have been prevented if something had been done. 

Sombra was selfish, but she was not made of ice. In her own way, she fought to make sure something like La Medianoche could never happen again, that people like Lumérico could never harm anyone ever again. She knew she contradicted herself in that sense by working with Talon, but she soothed her conscience by telling herself they were only means to an end, and when she was done with them, she‘d ruin them with a snap of her fingers.

Sombra was not made of ice. She could not pretend that everything she had just found out about what Talon had done to Widowmaker did not bother her. And if she was honest with herself, the fact that she did care bothered her more than anything else. 

\----------------

Of course, she brought the visor back in time, if just barely. Nobody would ever find a trace of what Sombra had done with it, she had made sure of that. It would continue to function exactly like it had before. A small part of Sombra wished she had tinkered around with a it a little, switched some of its features off, built in one or two... _new ones_. She could have, with just slightly more time, but there still would have been the considerable risk of being discovered. And that was one she couldn‘t take right now.

So she brought it back unchanged. 

The next afternoon, she saw it on Widowmaker‘s head again, red lenses glowing, nothing betraying the brutal invasion of privacy its mere existence meant. They weren‘t on a mission, but Widowmaker also wore the visor when using the shooting range. Sombra wasn‘t sure why, it wasn‘t like there was any change of being ambushed or any potentially hidden enemies the infrared could have detected through walls. Maybe putting it on had simply become routine for Widowmaker, part of the same muscle memory with which she placed her shots with deadly accuracy every single time. 

Sombra didn‘t come to the shooting range often herself. She didn‘t use her machine pistol half as much as Widow used the Kiss, naturally, and when she did, her aim didn‘t need to be perfect. She was an infiltrator, not an assaulter. If at all, she used the gun to defend herself, or to get past a couple of guards in rare cases. And that, she had enough practice in. She‘d done it since she was about eight years old. 

It was a coincidence that she went past the range this afternoon, still groggy from a lack of sleep, head buzzing with too many questions she couldn‘t seem to find answers to as easily as she always did. But once she recognized Widowmaker‘s slender silhouette firing at the human-shaped holographic targets, she couldn‘t help but linger, just for a moment, and watch. 

Sombra leaned against the doorway, and crossed her arms, eyes fixated on the sniper in front of her. Widow had her back turned to Sombra and didn‘t seem to notice her initially. It brought a slight smile to Sombra‘s lips. It wasn‘t often that her beautiful colleague allowed herself to be snuck up on. Sombra had to use the opportunity while it presented itself. 

On missions, she never had the time to watch Widowmaker this intently. When they were being shot at from all sides, everyone had to look out for their own survival first. But now, in the security of the headquarters, Sombra could simply _take_ the time. She could just stand here and smile and look. 

Sombra would not normally have called herself someone who appreciated slow, quiet moments. But she would have had to have a heart of stone in order not to enjoy the sight of Widowmaker slinking around the range, movements elegant and perfectly smooth, a look of intense concentration on her beautiful face, hands - bare of her usual gloves - clasped around her beloved rifle and firing shot after shot at the artificial humans that appeared around her. Every single bullet hit its mark perfectly, but that came as no surprise. Sombra did not believe she had ever seen Widowmaker miss a shot. 

She remembered the recordings of her old performances as a ballerina. Remembered the tutus and the pale skin and the spotlight that seemed to make her glow brighter than the stars themselves. 

It was strange to have seen those glimpses into the past and compare them to what was in front of her now. But when Sombra looked even a little closer than the first glance would allow her, she saw the similarities between the two women almost painfully clearly. The fight from the present was like a mirror image of the dance from the past, despite the violence in it that was new, the certain... finality in every turn, every leap. No blood appeared as Widowmaker‘s bullets struck the holograms, but Sombra could have sworn she still tasted it on her tongue, metallic and sweet. 

There was no more joy in Widowmaker‘s golden eyes as she danced her dance. Talon had taken that away. But the echoes of what she had been all that time ago were so clear, so strong. Sombra had never known her before and still she couldn‘t stop her heart from aching, just a little, just enough to make her avert her eyes for a moment and a sigh to escape her lips. She was sure it was barely audible, and no ordinary human would have heard. 

But Widowmaker did, and after she placed a bullet between the last hologram‘s eyes, she turned around, gaze settling on Sombra in the doorway and a frown twisting her features. 

„What are you doing?“ 

Sombra raised her hands apologetically. „Sorry, _araña_. Was just passing through and saw you training. Couldn‘t help myself.“

Widowmaker was silent for a few moments, and Sombra thought she was just going to turn back to her targets and ignore her. But then she asked, sounding strangely uncertain: 

„What is so interesting about watching me? You have seen me shoot many times.“ 

„Sure I have, _araña_ , but, y‘know, I don‘t think I‘ve ever taken the time to truly look.“

For a while, all they did was hold each other‘s gazes, entirely silent. Sombra studied Widowmaker‘s face, trying to find a trace of something, anything, that betrayed what was going through her head. For the longest time, her features were as expressionless as ever. The silence grew into a challenge, a question of who could hold out longer until either of them caved. 

Sombra had to admit she was surprised when Widowmaker was the first to raise her voice. 

„I take it you were impressed, then.“ Her voice was flat as usual, but the words held a certain edge that Sombra hadn‘t heard from her before and that sent a shiver down her spine, even as she smirked with all her usual bravado.

„Let‘s just say you certainly live up to your reputation, _princesa_.“

She took a moment to eye the other woman in her unusual getup. For once, Widowmaker wasn‘t wearing her dusty pink mission catsuit with the bulky gauntlet and the spiderwebs on the legs (Sombra would have called it cheesy, but she had neon pink stripes on her head so she couldn‘t really say anything). Instead, she was in black leggings and a dark purple tank top, oddly casual-looking clothes for her. In theory, she looked much more normal than she usually did, but somehow she still took Sombra more off guard like this than she ever had in the catsuit. 

„Honestly“, Sombra said slowly, carefully, „I don‘t think I‘d be able to land half as many shots as you do.“

Widow raised one perfect eyebrow. „Of course not. I am a sniper.“

Sombra rolled her eyes. „I noticed.“ She paused and waited for a few heartbeats, before she realized Widowmaker wasn‘t going to get the hint by herself. 

„You wouldn‘t happen to have any advice to give a girl, would you?“ She did her best to make the words sound casual. 

Widowmaker almost looked confused. „Advice? On how to shoot straighter?“ 

„Well, if you wanna phrase it that way...“

She seemed to consider Sombra‘s request, and that alone surprised the hacker. It hadn‘t really been a serious question, she had expected Widowmaker to reject her. An attempt to test the waters, more than anything, see how far she could go, see what the limits of her programming were. What she could allow herself and what not.

It seemed that, once again, Sombra was getting more than she bargained for. She was almost getting used to it by now. Though she had to admit, Widowmaker‘s golden eyes on her weren‘t nearly as unpleasant as reading through piles of data on how Talon had tortured her into submission.

„Ah, why not, actually.“ 

Sombra‘s eyes widened a fraction. She had been looking for a tiny crack in Widowmaker‘s facade, and instead she had stumbled onto this... this... _canyon_ rather than a crack. Just how much was the sniper hiding from her superiors?

Widowmaker motioned for Sombra to come over to where she was standing on the deactivated shooting range. Slowly, Sombra pushed off the doorframe and walked towards her, a part of her still wary. There was still a chance that Widowmaker was testing her just as she was testing Widowmaker. Sombra hadn‘t read Talon‘s „rules“ as attentively as she‘d been supposed to, but she suspected this kind of thing was unwanted if not technically disallowed. Especially if it involved their prized possession. 

But Widowmaker didn‘t go back on her words. Instead, she shocked Sombra even more by pressing her rifle into her hands while calling up a stationary target at the other end of the shooting range with a brief vocal command. 

„You.. you know we don‘t have to use your gun, don‘t you?“, Sombra asked cautiously. Widowmaker cast her a sideways glance. 

„Is there anything wrong with my gun?“

„No. Of course not.“ Sombra weighed the rifle in her hands carefully. It was obviously custom-made for someone taller and a little stronger than her, but she suspected she could probably still handle it reasonably well. Balance-wise, it was perfect. Lightweight, perfectly streamlined. As beautiful as a weapon could be. 

„I just thought you might not be big on me, you know, touching it.“ 

Widowmaker almost sounded tired as she answered. „It is only a rifle, _petit ombre_. You should not worry so much about things you do not understand.“ 

Sombra was a little insulted at the meaning the last sentence carried, but bit back a snarky remark. The nickname that had slipped out again hadn‘t gone unnoticed. _Little shadow. Ha._

„Now“, Widowmaker motioned towards the target, „try to hit as close to the center as possible.“ 

Sombra obliged, slowly lifting the unfamiliar weapon until she could look through the scope. She wasn‘t sure when she‘d last used a gun that had had one of those. Her own machine pistol certainly didn‘t need it. And Sombra had never been a sniper. 

Still, she knew how this worked... in theory. She squeezed one eye shut and peered through the red-tinted magnifying lens. As she held the rifle right now, the crosshairs was pointing slightly to the left of the target, and too far down. Sombra shifted her stance slightly as she did her best to correct her aim. She could feel Widowmaker‘s presence behind her, watching her every move intently, though not touching her for even a second, and entirely silent. It seemed that she wanted to know how Sombra would do on her own first. 

She decided to indulge her. When her aim was as accurate as she could manage, she took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger. 

The noise was comparatively low, as reasonable for a sniper rifle. The recoil, though, was massive. Sombra was almost sure she‘d have bruises from the Kiss slamming into her shoulder. She bit back any complaints, though, and instead tried to see where she had hit the target. Her face fell a little at the sight. Not terrible by any normal standards, but not particularly good either. The bullet had gone through the hologram quite far off from the center. On a human, the shot hardly would have been lethal. 

„I expected as much“, Widowmaker hummed. She didn‘t sound angry. Sombra still threw her a slightly irritated glance over the shoulder. 

„What‘s that supposed to mean?“ 

„I have also seen you fire before, Sombra. I am... to a degree... familiar with the mistakes you tend to make.“

Sombra huffed. „Gee, thanks, _araña._ “

„It was you who asked for my help, was it not?“

„Yeah, yeah.“ She was starting to wonder whether this had been such a good idea. „Go off, then. What exactly are those mistakes you‘re talking about?“

„You are uncertain. You do not truly know what you are doing. You are aware of this. Therefore, you expect your shots to miss. You do not like missing, so you attempt to correct yourself. Because you want to protect your ego, however, you put pressure on yourself instead. This makes it worse, and the outcome is as you initially expected.“ 

Sombra‘s nicked eyebrows rose. „Since when did you become a mind reader, _princesa?_ “ 

The corners of Widowmaker‘s mouth almost twitched. Almost. „Since I am right, I don‘t see how I need to justify it.“

Sombra chuckled. She didn‘t either confirm or reject the sniper‘s words.

„So how do I fix it?“, she asked instead. „How do I stop being uncertain?“ 

„You stop thinking about _you_ and starting thinking about the target.“ 

She felt Widowmaker coming up behind her, her body so close to Sombra‘s suddenly that they were almost, _almost_ touching. Widowmaker‘s hands reached around them both and grasped the rifle, just short of where Sombra‘s own hands were. Carefully, she lifted it for both of them until Sombra‘s eye was at the scope again. She could feel Widowmaker‘s breath on the back of her neck. 

„Look.“ Her voice had grown oddly soft. „Try not to see it as a challenge. Try not to think about missing or hitting.“

„Then what am I supposed to think about?“

„How the target will look with your bullet buried between its eyes.“ 

Sombra swallowed, hard. Widow‘s breath was cold, like all of her was. 

„It is not you who needs to hit your mark“, she continued, „It is the target that needs to die. Do you understand?“ 

„ _Sí_... I think I do.“ 

She looked through the scope, tried to envision the smoking hole in the hologram at the other end of the barrel. Widow‘s hands moved, leaving the rifle and instead grasping Sombra‘s bare forearms. She almost jumped at the sudden contact. Widow‘s skin was ice cold. 

Those cold, cold fingers squeezed her arms gently. 

„Relax“, she murmured, close to Sombra‘s ear. „The more you try to hold it steady, the more you will tense up and the shot will come out skewed...“

_Dios_ , she was trying, but Widow was making it hard to concentrate. Was she doing this on purpose? Sombra had no idea and it was driving her crazy.

She took a deep breath and did her best to let her muscles loosen as instructed. The Kiss was cool against her cheek. She could have sworn she felt the rifle humming in her hands. Was this what Widowmaker felt just before she made a kill? 

The sniper‘s lips brushed the shell of her ear for a split second. „Pull the trigger, _chérie_.“ 

Sombra exhaled. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She crooked her finger. 

The recoil made her take a tiny step backwards, and her back collided with Widowmaker. She froze, not moving, barely breathing. She expected the sniper to push her away. But for some reason Sombra could not fathom, she didn‘t. She remained exactly where she was, fingers still wrapped around Sombra‘s arms, her unnaturally slow breath brushing the shaved side of her head. 

Through the slight haze of smoke that had erupted from the Kiss‘s barrel, Sombra could see that she had hit the target dead center. 

She craned her neck just a little, trying to catch a glimpse of Widowmaker‘s face. There was a smile tugging at the edges of the sniper‘s dark blue mouth. 

„Knew you had it in you.“ 

„I... I don‘t think I did“, Sombra breathed. Her head felt oddly dizzy. She didn‘t think it was from exhaustion. There was a fire burning beneath her skin where Widowmaker was still touching her, no matter how cold her hands were. 

They remained like this for a few more moments. Then Widowmaker finally let go of her and stepped back, Sombra turning around to face the sniper. Something dangerously close to regret coursed through her. She bit her lip and swallowed it down. 

„Um... thanks. For the tips, I mean.“ 

She could have kicked herself for sounding so terribly awkward.

„There is nothing to thank me for.“ Widowmaker‘s face was cold and impassive again. „If you hit your targets more reliably, it will benefit all of us on missions.“

„Sure. I guess it will.“ Sombra handed her back her rifle. Their fingers brushed for a split second as Widowmaker took the weapon from her. The same cold fire erupted in the place where they‘d touched. 

„I will be going now. I have a briefing I have to attend.“

Sombra nodded automatically. „‘Course. Have fun, _araña._ “

„I doubt I will.“ 

For an instant, that thing from before was back - that something in her voice that felt almost like life. 

Widowmaker shouldered her rifle. 

„ _À plus, petit ombre._ “ 

The next moment, she was gone. Sombra remained where was was. She looked down at her bare arms, the spots where Widowmaker had held them. 

When she trailed the fingers on one hand over one, her skin still felt a little cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translations: 
> 
> "madre de dios" - "mother of god" but it's not a meme in spanish as far as i know
> 
> "chérie" - well you probably know this one but it means darling or love and fun fact i'm pretty sure it literally translates to "expensive/valuable one" so there you have french priorities 
> 
> "à plus, petit ombre" - "see you later, little shadow"


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this week we're looking at some more bonding, a direct reference to current canon and a dash of good old angst to spice it all up! i think i can definitely say that this chapter is a turning point within the story especially for sombra, and i'd love to hear what you think about it : ) 
> 
> warning for ptsd-ish reaction to resurfacing of traumatic memories (could be read as dissociation probably?).
> 
> enjoy!

The days dragged on, turning into weeks, and eventually months, all filled with the same bland routine Sombra was gradually - perilously - getting used to. It was close to a year ago that she joined up with Talon, although she doubted that anyone would hold a celebration. She still suspected most of the basic henchman types didn‘t like her and were probably frustrated that she‘d stuck around this long. She wasn‘t going to start on Gabe, and Widow...

Well. Sombra found herself unsure of what to think of Widow these days. The sniper was making it hard to be as sure of what she was dealing with as Sombra had used to be. When she‘d first arrived here, it had been indifference, then blatant dislike for a short while, which eventually grew back into indifference with the occasional spark of irritation. That had been easy, Sombra had been able to comprehend that.

But now, after that disastrous mission in the chemical factory a few months ago, something was different. Sombra couldn‘t put her finger on it, but it was there. Widowmaker didn‘t seem as distant anymore. She didn‘t ignore Sombra‘s attempts at conversation as often. She even gave actual replies. They could _talk_ to each other. Sombra hadn‘t even been sure that was possible with Widowmaker.

Sometimes, just sometimes, she could even get a small smile out of the famously ice cold sniper. It wasn‘t often, but the fact that it happened at all was proof that Widowmaker‘s conditioning was not doing its job entirely. Smiles should have been just as meaningless to her as tears or rage. 

Sombra couldn‘t say it bothered her. She kept a close eye on it, but not because she had any intention of reporting Widowmaker to Talon. It was a different, more personal kind of interest. 

Widow didn‘t touch her again after that afternoon on the shooting range, but Sombra still remembered how her fingers had felt wrapped around her slender forearms, the shape of her body as Sombra‘s back was pressed against it. It wasn‘t something you could just forget.

In weak moments, Sombra found herself wishing it could happen again. Just once. She just wanted to reach out and trail her fingers over that cold, cold skin one more time, wanted to feel Widowmaker‘s slow heart one more time. Just to see. See if it was still as it had been that morning. If the cold fire would still erupt beneath Sombra‘s skin wherever they touched. 

But she knew she couldn‘t. And so she kept her distance, even as she found herself a little closer to cracking Widowmaker‘s walls every day. As it turned out, the sniper had a very particular kind of dry humor that Sombra found herself enjoying a lot. And there were a lot more thoughts in her head, complex, dark thoughts of the kind that Talon no doubt looked down on, than Sombra had ever suspected. 

She wanted to believe she could call what they had a friendship, if a tentative, fragile one. She didn‘t dare bringing it up to Widowmaker, though. She was sure that would have destroyed whatever it was in a heartbeat. Technically, they weren‘t even supposed to get along. They weren‘t supposed to bond outside of missions. Widowmaker wasn‘t really supposed to do anything but function as she was programmed to. Get up, follow orders, shoot, train, maybe eat a little, though that didn‘t seem to happen a lot either, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat. 

Sombra couldn‘t say it didn‘t give her a little thrill that Widowmaker was starting to break that routine because of her. But they were still making baby steps. There was progress, but it was slow. Almost as slow as Sombra‘s program doing its best to decrypt the final part of Widow‘s file. 

That was why Sombra was more than a little surprised when Widowmaker suddenly appeared in her room one late evening in early December. 

She had made no sound coming in and Sombra only noticed her because one of her alarms started beeping softly at the intrusion. She frowned, craning her neck and attempting to see who her unexpected guest was. 

„ _Araña?_ “ 

There was no keeping the surprise out of her voice. 

„What‘re you doing here? You okay?“ 

„Yes.“ The answer sounded robotic, pre-programmed. It was what Widowmaker was expected to say. Sombra didn‘t press further. She swiveled around in her chair so she could face the sniper. 

Widow looked just like she always did, though her skin appeared more purple than blue in the faint light of Sombra‘s screens. She was in the same set of off-duty clothes she had worn every day since Sombra had first met her, the same signature ponytail that never seemed to come loose. 

But there was something in her eyes that put Sombra off. Something that wasn‘t supposed to be there. Sombra couldn‘t place it exactly. It almost looked like fear. 

She was almost sure that Widowmaker was not, in fact, okay. But she also knew that asking further would have led to nothing. Still, her guard was very much up as she sat in her chair quietly and waited for Widow to speak first. 

It took her a short while. She almost looked like she was looking for the right words.

„I... I need a favor“, Widowmaker said finally. Sombra‘s eyebrows shot up. Well, if that wasn‘t the last thing she had expected her colleague to say. 

„You need a favor.“ 

What sort of favor could someone like Widowmaker possibly want? What was there that Sombra could do for her? And what was important enough for her to actually ask for help because of it?

The sniper looked very uncomfortable standing there halfway between the door and Sombra‘s desk. Sombra would have liked to offer her a seat, but she only had the one chair. It added to the awkwardness of the whole situation. 

She cleared her throat. „Um. What kind of favor are we talking here? The _Sombra the wifi is down and I don‘t know how to restart it_ sort of favor or more the kind where you need me to commit a criminal offense?“

Not that Widowmaker wasn‘t perfectly capable of doing so herself. 

The sniper didn‘t meet Sombra‘s eyes as she spoke. 

„I need to get out of the base for... for maybe a day. I have to go somewhere. And... Talon can‘t know I‘m gone.“ 

„Oh.“ 

Oh, indeed. This conversation had suddenly become a lot more interesting. And a lot more dangerous. Sombra had never been so glad that Talon had no ears and no eyes inside her room. Widowmaker must have been aware of that, too. It was probably the reason she had felt safe enough to come to Sombra with this at all. This room was the only part of her whole world where she could have any kind of privacy. 

„Why?“ The word tumbled out of Sombra‘s mouth before she could think about it. „No offense, but keeping secrets from Talon isn‘t your style, _araña._ “

Widowmaker immediately tensed up. Sombra made a dismissive gesture with a pink-clawed hand. 

„Don‘t worry, I‘m not going to snitch you out. Where would be the fun in that?“

Adding one more reason for Talon to have her killed to the pile that already existed really wasn‘t too big of a deal at this point. It wasn‘t as though they were ever going to find out. And Sombra liked Widowmaker. She did not like Talon, in spite of her current alliance with them. It wasn‘t a hard decision to make. 

„It‘s personal.“ Widowmaker sounded like the words physically pained her. 

„Can you get a little more specific here?“ Sombra sighed. „Listen, _princesa_ , I know you‘re real big on privacy and all that, but I can‘t help you if you keep talking in riddles. Where do you even want to go? If it‘s too far away, it‘ll be hard having Talon not notice.“ 

„A city in France. Annecy.“ 

A second _oh_ almost escaped Sombra, but she swallowed it down. Annecy. The place where Widowmaker had grown up. That sounded personal indeed. 

She sighed again. „Okay, if this is going to be like _that_ , I think you‘d better sit down.“ 

She pushed herself up from her chair, skipped over to Widowmaker and mindlessly grabbed her wrist to drag her over to her half-heartedly made bed. She felt the sniper flinch sharply at the touch. 

Her skin was still cold as ice. The fire was still there. 

Sombra let go of her wrist with a pang of regret in her chest. „Sorry.“

To her surprise, Widowmaker shook her head. „ _Pas grave._ “ 

Sombra watched her intently for another moment, looking for something that betrayed what the sniper was thinking. She still wasn‘t returning Sombra‘s gaze. Had she meant what she had said? There was no way to tell. 

Finally, Sombra relented. „Okay. You should still sit down.“ 

Now Widowmaker looked annoyed again. That was more like what Sombra was used to from her. But she followed the hacker over to the bed, lowering herself onto the very edge, stiffly as always. Sombra flopped down next to her, making the mattress bounce a little. 

„Cards on the table, _araña_ \- what do you want in Annecy? Visiting family?“

„Not... exactly.“ 

„Listen...“

Sombra shifted uncomfortably, overcome by a sudden onslaught of guilt. Since when did she care about what others thought of her finding out their secrets? 

„I know you were born there“, she confessed, kicking her feet. „Your family owns this gigantic ass lake castle ‘n everything. You don‘t have to pretend you have ,business related‘ reasons or whatever for going there.“ 

Widowmaker‘s yellow eyes were narrow when she finally looked up at Sombra. 

„Have you been spying on me?“

Sombra shrugged apologetically. „It‘s kind of what I do, _araña_. Nothing personal.“

Widowmaker looked like she disapproved. Deeply. But she didn‘t say anymore. Maybe she was afraid that Sombra wouldn‘t want to help her anymore if she did. 

Widowmaker. Afraid. They weren‘t exactly words Sombra was used to hearing in the same sentence. It sounded wrong somehow, unnatural, even though she knew that there were a great many unnatural things about Widowmaker, and if fear had anything to do with them, it was the fact that she often seemed to lack it completely. Sombra couldn‘t help but think that the sniper had never seemed as human as she did in this present moment. 

A quiet sigh escaped her blue lips. 

„A grave. I want to go there for a grave.“

„Whose grave?“ 

Sombra asked without thinking, and pedaled back immediately. 

„I mean, you don‘t have to tell me if you don‘t want to...“ 

Widowmaker shook her head. „No. I suppose you deserve to know if I want your help.“ Her expression was unreadable. „My husband is buried there.“ 

That complicated matters. Talon had had a hand in Gérard Lacroix‘s death, from what Sombra had found out. It wouldn‘t make them more sympathetic to Widowmaker‘s extracurricular activities. 

„Okay.“ She exhaled audibly. „You want to go to Annecy to visit your husbands grave, did I get that right?“

„ _Oui._ “

„That‘s not a small thing, _araña._ “

„I know.“ 

„Good. You should.“ 

Sombra called up a virtual map of Southern Europe between them. A thick purple line marked the shortest route from Venice to Annecy. 

„You‘re lucky your destination is close to the border. Depending on how you‘re traveling, you can make that trip in five, maybe six hours.“ She paused. „Twice that much if you count the journey back, and there‘s also the time you‘re actually spending there. If we‘re being very optimistic, we‘re talking at least twelve hours you‘ll be gone.“ 

„Can you do it or not?“, Widowmaker demanded. Sombra rolled her eyes.

„Um, hello? This is me you‘re talking about. If I want to, I can do almost anything. In theory, this isn‘t difficult. All I have to do is hack a dropship for you, mask you from being detected and have some security cameras malfunctioning at a convenient time. Piece of cake.“ 

„The difficult part is Talon.“ It wasn‘t a question, but Sombra nodded nonetheless.

„There‘s absolutely no way in hell I can convince them you‘re in your room where you should be when you‘re actually in France for twelve hours without them becoming suspicious. We‘ll have to be a little creative if we want to get you out of here.“ 

Widowmaker looked suspicious. „Define creative.“ 

Sombra waved her hand again and the screen with the map vanished. „Simple. We tell them you‘re going to one place, but you‘re not actually going to _that_ place but to _another_ place.“ 

„That sounds the opposite of simple.“

She was probably right, but Sombra wasn‘t going to let that show. The truth was that the whole operation they were cooking up on the fly right now was going to be incredibly, ridiculously risky. There was a huge risk that they were going to get caught, something Sombra wouldn‘t survive and Widow... she didn‘t want to think about what they would do to Widow. It required a lot of very careful planning and even more careful execution. Absolutely no one but the two of them could know about it, not even Gabe. And everything had to go perfectly. One tiny slip, one moment of carelessness and it would all crumble like a house of cards.

Of course, Sombra was still going to do it. She could not figure out why, but she had known she would from the moment Widowmaker had said that she needed a favor.

She was going to risk everything she had built for herself over the past year and possibly more because of a blue assassin‘s sentimental whim. It was stupid, very much so. But Sombra had always been very good at stupid things. 

She gave Widowmaker a crooked grin. „Looks like you‘ll just have to trust me, _chica._ “

\----------------

Over the course of the next few weeks, Sombra spent major parts of her free time making the arrangements for Widowmaker‘s little trip. The day it would take place had ended up being the 24th of December. Widowmaker had asked for it specifically. Sombra couldn‘t understand why, but she had complied. It didn‘t make it more complicated than it already was. With an organization like Talon, having a mission scheduled on Christmas Eve wasn‘t unusual in the least, especially not for an agent like Widowmaker, a so-called „Asset“ who was expected to be available at all times anyway. And in theory, Christmas probably shouldn‘t have held any more sentimental value to her than other things that had been a part of her life before the transformation.

Except Sombra had come to understand that a lot of what was supposed to hold true for Widowmaker in theory did not work nearly that well in practice. Talon did its best to control every aspect of her, but they had no idea that festering beneath the surface was something that was not part of their creation, something brought into existence by the very chains that had been meant to keep it under control. 

Sombra still wasn‘t sure whether Widowmaker was simply a very good actress or whether she was so used to her routine that she continued to act the way she had for years automatically, simply because she did not know how to stop. 

But she did know that Talon had no idea that their little lapdog was doing things it shouldn‘t. 

After that day in the hangar, there had been no more incidents that Sombra was aware of. And she was aware of everything that happened within the headquarters. She did not feel as safe here anymore as she had - foolishly - started to initially, but that didn‘t mean she didn‘t still have her eyes and ears everywhere. Absolutely everywhere, as opposed to Talon themselves. 

It was helpful enough in coming up with a plan for smuggling Widowmaker away from the compound for half a day. Sombra had been right in her estimation that they would need to feed Talon some kind of story about why their top assassin had to leave on her own on such a short notice. A story that would have to be absolutely waterproof.

Sombra ended up making up a whole false company, a supposed French security startup that was a little to reckless and a little bit too interested in the history of incidents associated with Talon. She set up a website, complete with contact data and pirated photos of the CEO and staff. She wrote out entire e-mail correspondences, as convincing as they were false. She even set up a mock bank account for Talon to watch, with a suspiciously quickly increasing amount of money on it. 

It didn‘t take much more than a few very bold statements from the fake CEO about his plans to stop Talon once and for all, and equally fake plans for new security systems that were specifically meant to keep out its operators based on what was known to the public about them. Sombra, pretending to be concerned, wired all of this information to her employers, dropped a few hints here and there, and the decision was made that the CEO would have to die. 

„Good choice, _amigo_ “, Sombra told the officer that had the final word on the matter. „Pluck out the weed before it can spread its roots too far.“

He gave her an odd look, but didn‘t question her. Good.

They sent Widowmaker, of course. An assassination such as this needed to be carried out swiftly and discreetly, especially at this time of the year, and nobody was better at swift and discreet than Widowmaker. Sombra breathed a deep sigh of relief when she got the news. The first and most difficult part of the plan had been successful. Now she just had to get Widow to Annecy and back safely.

She hacked the dropship that was supposed to fly her to the site of the assassination. The flight records would show nothing but what Talon expected. Nothing on any detours to Annecy. Sombra had updated the systems on those ships herself, they were like toy planes to her. She could have had the damn thing fly halfway around the world and Talon would have been none the wiser. 

Still, she couldn‘t deny that she was a little nervous as she watched the ship take off on her monitors. The next twelve hours would literally decide over life and death. 

Once more, she wondered what had gotten into her to along with this insane plan. But it was too late to stop now. She chewed on her bottom lip anxiously, eyes glued to the screens. She had lent Widow some of her clothes, stashed them in the ship ahead of time so the sniper could change when she got close to her destination. If she didn‘t want anyone to know it was her when they saw her, she couldn‘t just walk around Annecy in her metallic purple catsuit. She had given Sombra a strange glance, but complied when the hacker had urged her to take her old coat that she hadn‘t worn in years, gloves and a thick scarf that Widow was supposed to wrap over her mouth and nose, so her blue skin wouldn‘t draw as much attention. 

Sombra hoped the sniper would stick to the plan. She had explained it to her multiple times in every single detail to the point where Widowmaker had threatened to shoot her if Sombra kept treating her like a dense child. 

No, Widowmaker certainly wasn‘t dense. It was just that she hadn‘t spent time in the company of normal human beings in nearly seven years except for the purpose of killing them, and there were a thousand things that could go wrong. 

Sombra knew she wouldn‘t sleep for even a minute until the dropship got back. She would stay here in her room and watch the screens obsessively for all of those twelve hours.

She sighed. At least she still had a good stash of Doritos in here.

\----------------

Nothing went wrong.

The entire operation went so smoothly it was almost enough to make Sombra suspicious. She double checked Talon‘s records. There was nothing that indicated they suspected anything. 

When Widowmaker arrived back at the base after the scheduled time of eleven hours and fifty-three minutes, the made-up mission report flowed from her tongue smoothly as silk. Had Sombra not known any better, even she would have believed every word. Gabriel and the other Talon higher-ups certainly did. Sombra had already released some fake news headlines about the CEO‘s sudden death on the internet. She would keep up the charade for a while to disperse any doubts about the truthfulness of the whole thing. But the main part, the part that was actually dangerous, was over now. 

Still, Sombra was waiting by the hangar doors when the dropship landed. This time, she didn‘t intervene as the officers that welcomed Widowmaker questioned her about the mission. She didn‘t need to draw anymore attention to herself. 

But she was concerned about Widow. Physically, she appeared unharmed, and as far as Sombra could tell, her cold facade had suffered no substantial cracks either. But Sombra knew her well enough by now to know that there was not much more to it than just that - a facade. Glimpses past it were rare, but they had been growing more and more frequent. Widowmaker wasn‘t nearly as emotionless as she pretended. Sombra couldn‘t imagine something as loaded with painful memories as this trip had to have been not affecting her at all. 

Finally, the officers let her go. Slowly, she started making her way across the hangar to the exit where Sombra was waiting. She had taken off the coat and scarf and changed back into the mission catsuit, though she was not wearing the visor or carrying the Kiss anymore. Sombra suspected they were being taken back to the Armory. 

Widowmaker offered her no greeting, although her yellow gaze eventually shifted and rested on her. She had seen her, at the very least.

„Hey“, Sombra said quietly, „everything go well?“

Widow nodded.

„You okay?“

Sombra expected another nod. None came. Widow didn‘t negate the question anymore than she affirmed it. She just kept looking at Sombra, the expression on her face as impassive as ever.

Too impassive, in fact. 

She didn‘t just look cold. She looked distant, like her mind was only half anchored in reality. Her eyes were glassy, her gaze struggling to remain focused on Sombra, going through her and into the distance behind her instead. 

Something was wrong. Very wrong. 

Sombra took a deep breath.

„Okay, _araña_. You‘re safe, okay? Everything‘s alright. Nobody‘s gonna hurt you. I‘m here.“

Without thinking about it, she reached out to take Widowmaker‘s cold hand in hers. It seemed to bring her back to reality if nothing else, the fog over her eyes clearing a little. 

„Sombra.“ It was little more than a whisper. She had not withdrawn her hand. 

„Let‘s... let‘s get you out of here, okay? Then you can tell me what happened.“ 

Sombra doubted that she could get anything out of Widowmaker in the state she was in. She was talking more to keep herself from panicking than anything else. She didn‘t know how to handle this situation and it was unnerving her to a ridiculous degree. 

Sombra wasn‘t used to being helpless. She had done everything to make sure she never would be again. 

Widowmaker was well on the way to ruining it all. 

Sombra still squeezed her hand and tugged her after her down the hallway, in the direction of her room. She still kept talking to her in a low voice that she hoped constituted as soothing, still made sure to look around every corner twice so nobody would cross their way and see Widowmaker like this. She still pushed her inside her room and made her sit down on the bed like she had that evening when Widowmaker had first come here. And then she closed the door, locked it, and had her programs sweep the room twice for bugs and spy software before she finally allowed herself to relax and sit down next to Widow. 

The sniper was still staring blankly ahead, her posture oddly slumped as opposed to the ever-present stiffness Sombra was used to from her. She looked like every bit of her strength had left her abruptly. 

„ _Araña?_ Talk to me.“ 

Sombra scooted closer to her. 

„What‘s wrong? What happened?“

No answer. Sombra carefully placed her hand back atop Widow‘s, hoping it would shock some life back into her like it had before. 

„Were you attacked or...“

„No.“ The word came out so softly that Sombra barely caught it. Widow‘s face was shrouded in shadows in the dimly lit room. 

„Then what...?“ 

Again, Widow remained silent. Sombra let out a noise that was somewhere between frustration and worry. 

„ _Dios mio_ , I can see that something‘s not right, the _I‘m fine_ route is not gonna-“

„I killed him, Sombra.“ 

Widow‘s voice was deathly quiet and Sombra‘s breath seemed to leave her body all at once. 

„You... you what?“ 

„My husband. Gérard. I killed him.“ Her eyes were still focused on some point on Sombra‘s wall, the light in them weak and flickering. Her fingers beneath Sombra‘s were trembling. 

„He was my first mission. My first target.“ She kept talking as if she didn‘t even care whether Sombra was listening or not. „It was what they took me for, I think. I am not sure. They did not tell me. I... I don‘t remember what they did. How I became... this. I just know that I was there... and then I was not anymore, and there was pain... so much pain, Sombra. You could not begin to imagine how much.“ 

Sombra was beginning to think she could. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, her blood pounding in her ears. 

„They brought me back“, Widow continued softly, „for a little while. They... Angela thought there was nothing wrong with me. They let me go home.“

Angela Ziegler. One of the old Overwatch members. Sombra had been keeping tabs on her for years and she knew it was her technology that had made Gabriel into what he was. Now it seemed Widowmaker was part of her handiwork too. Sombra grit her teeth against the anger she felt burning up inside her. 

„I‘m not sure how long it was until it happened... it was at night, you understand, he was asleep...“

The trembling was getting stronger. 

„There was a box cutter knife in the drawer on the nightstand. I do not remember why it was there. Just that I took it out and I knelt above him. And I... I...“

She didn‘t finish her sentence, but she didn‘t have to. Sombra didn‘t think she could breathe. She hadn‘t even noticed when Widowmaker had interlaced her fingers with her own cold blue ones, only that now, her grip was so firm that it almost hurt. Sombra didn‘t let go.

„He was asleep, you see...“ Widowmaker‘s voice was becoming unsteady, her accent thickening noticeably. Her eyes were wide and glazed over.

„He was asleep. He never could have felt a thing. He never woke up. He just... died. I don‘t think he even noticed.“

Sombra shook her head. She felt strangely numb. „No, _princesa_ “, she murmured. „I don‘t think he did.“

It was supposed to sound soothing. She wasn‘t sure if it came out as anything other than terrifying. 

Widowmaker turned her head ever-so-slightly in Sombra‘s direction. Her eyes were glinting oddly in the purple light of the ever-present holographic screens. 

„There was so much blood“, she whispered. „You should have seen it, Sombra... it was everywhere...“ 

Sombra reached out and pulled Widow to her. She met no resistance. Instead, Widow‘s arms wrapped around her in a vice-like, almost painful grip. Sombra didn‘t care. She felt Widow bury her face in her hair and she had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to hold back the tears that had welled up in her eyes. 

So it was true. The worst of what she had suspected. A part of her had always known this was a possibility when she had read Widow‘s file. It had made sense in a terribly macabre way. But Sombra hadn‘t wanted to believe that. 

Now, she had no choice. She was sitting here on her bed with Widowmaker in her arms, stroking the famous sniper‘s back absentmindedly, trying very hard not to cry, and could not for the life of her figure out how to go on. The creeping feeling that she had severely underestimated Talon when she had joined them had been right, and Sombra was realizing only now just how little she knew about what she was dealing with.

_Stupid, stupid girl_. They were a _terrorist organization._ What had she expected? Office parties and birthday cakes? She wasn‘t naive enough to believe that, she wasn‘t. She was smarter than everyone here. She was Sombra, and nothing would ever be enough to get the best of her again. Nothing. _Nothing._

She just had to figure out why she suddenly felt like a black hole had opened up beneath her feet, threatening to draw her into its gaping abyss. Her arms tightened around Widowmaker. 

„It‘s okay. You‘re okay. Everything‘s gonna be alright.“ 

A part of her knew that she was lying, but what else could she possibly have said?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translations, or rather translation since there's only one new one in here:
> 
> "pas grave" - "it's fine/don't worry about it"


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is maybe my favorite chapter out of this whole story - it has some really key emotional moments for both of them in here and i'm very happy with how the dialogue turned out. personally, i believe this chapter is where i got really comfortable with the two of them, especially sombra's voice. a little late maybe for an 8 chapter fic, but keep in mind i had never written anything about either of them before : ) so i hope you guys enjoy it as much as i enjoyed writing it.
> 
> the last part of this chapter was written by hand on my notepad for school during history class haha that's how committed i am
> 
> i seem to remember listening to limitless by nct-127 while writing the long conversation part of this (you'll know it when you get to it i don't wanna spoil anything ahead of time) so if you wanna listen to it while reading, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmUn7V6uuZM
> 
> enjoy!

Widowmaker was still affected by what had transpired days after the event. It couldn‘t be particularly obvious to the ordinary observer, but to Sombra it was clear as day and she was terribly worried about someone else noticing. Gabriel, at least, was too busy sulking somewhere to pay attention to Widowmaker‘s troubles - she had explained to Sombra a while ago that it was what he always did around the holidays. Apparently it reminded him of happier times, when he had still been with Overwatch. Under different circumstances, Sombra might have attempted to cheer him up, but as things were, she was busy enough trying to figure out what exactly was going on with Widowmaker, and how to do something about it.

The sniper still insisted that nothing out of the ordinary had transpired during her visit to the graveyard in Annecy. There had been no attacks, no suspicious activity. Nobody had interrupted her. After she had burst out with the story of how she had killed Gérard Lacroix, she had retreated into her shell, being even less talkative than usual. The best guess Sombra could make at the moment was that being so close to her old home, and especially seeing her husbands grave - possibly for the first time since his death - had somehow triggered a lot of repressed memories within Widowmaker. She had mentioned gaps in her memory of the events before her transformation. Maybe a lot of that had come back to her very abruptly upon coming into contact with those things. It only furthered Sombra‘s suspicions that the microchip in her brain wasn‘t functioning properly anymore. She had been seeing the effects of that malfunctioning more and more frequently. It couldn‘t be much longer until Talon would start noticing it too, and then they would... what? Recondition Widow somehow? Put her through the same procedures that had gotten her to this point? 

Sombra wasn‘t a doctor, but from everything she had found out, she found it hard to believe that any human being could survive something like that a second time.

Now, seeing Widowmaker like this, closed-off once again to the degree where she could barely uphold basic conversation, her gaze drifting off into the distance more and more often, stiff and unresponsive and seemingly entirely caught up in whatever was going on in that messed up head of hers... Sombra couldn‘t help but keep thinking about what was going to happen to her. Somebody would notice. Somebody had to notice. 

The thought of Talon doing anything like _that_ to her ever again made Sombra sick to her stomach, and something start brewing inside her that she was sure would eventually explode violently if she had to witness the way those people looked at Widow one more time. Sombra had realized long ago that the sniper really was nothing more than an object to them. They treated her like their property. As far as they were concerned, she was theirs to do with as they pleased, however cruel it might be, so as long as it didn‘t impair her ability to achieve her objectives to perfection. 

What Sombra hated more than anything was her inability to do anything about it. Helplessness was not a feeling she was used to anymore, it was among the things she had thought she had gotten rid of when she had had her implants installed and perfected herself as much as humanly possible. But now, a single false step could mean signing her own death certificate, and Widow‘s right along with it. 

She knew things about the sniper that nobody else did, things that were _forbidden_. By now, she was in far too deep to back out of whatever she had gotten herself into when her interest in Widowmaker had begun transcending pure professional fascination. Instead, it had grown into a bizarre attachment that she still couldn‘t fully comprehend. But she did have an idea that it was, in a way, mutual. And that alone made it special enough for Sombra to _not want_ to back out of whatever this was. 

Her decryption program was almost finished but the code on the final part of Widowmaker‘s file. It couldn‘t be more than a week or two at most now. 

Sombra had a feeling that whatever that file would reveal would finally give her the last pieces of the puzzle she had been working on. And when it was finished, she would have to make a decision. A decision the outcome of which was already frighteningly evident to her when she stole a glance at Widow‘s flawless pale blue profile in the dim light that always seemed to fill the halls of the Venice Headquarters.

But until then, she made it her personal mission to drag her favorite spider out of the hole she had been steadily digging for herself since Christmas Eve. Even if that mission involved lying to Talon and smuggling their prime asset out from under their nose once again. 

„Because you can‘t keep sitting inside this stinking concrete block forever, _araña_ “, she reasoned when Widowmaker‘s reply to her proposal was a very confused „ _Pourquoi?_ “ 

„In case you haven‘t noticed“, Widow snapped, „I am not allowed to leave this ,stinking concrete block‘, as you so aptly put it, Sombra.“ 

Sombra rolled her eyes. „No offense, but don‘t you think you crossed that line when you had me smuggle you into _France_ for half a day?“

There was really nothing Widow could say against that. And so she reluctantly allowed Sombra to once more put her in what the hacker called her „undercover outfit“, and followed her outside through one of the tunnels that allowed maintenance units to enter and leave the hangar with the dropships. Their escape was concealed by Sombra utilizing the oldest trick in the book - she set off the intruder alarm. This meant obnoxiously loud sirens blaring all throughout the compound, every soldier on base in full gear and searching every inch of the building for whoever had snuck past their defenses, and the entire thing on lockdown. The doors to rooms that contained „sensitive equipment“ were locked automatically and could not be opened until the all-clear signal was given. Sensitive equipment, as Sombra had found out with some disgust, apparently included Widowmaker. Nobody would be able to get into her room for at least an hour or two. And having most security cameras on the compound malfunctioning at the same time wasn‘t something out of the ordinary for an emergency such as this. If everything went according to plan, nobody would notice Sombra and Widowmaker were gone. They just had to be back in time. 

„What about my tracking chip?“, Widowmaker hissed in her ear as they hurried through the tunnels. „They will see where we were later-“

„Have a little faith, _amiga_. Do you really think I can‘t rewrite a few coordinate records?“

„What if they check while we are gone?“

Sombra groaned. „ _Madre de Dios_... if I didn‘t know any better, I‘d guess you want to stay here.“ 

She stopped suddenly, and cast Widow a suspicious glance. „Do you want to stay here?“

Widow hesitated for a moment. „No“, she sighed. 

„Then what‘s the issue?“

„It is... risky.“

„Are you serious?“ Sombra stared at her with a mixture of incredulousness and amusement. „ _Querida_ , you are presently the most wanted assassin in the world, are you aware of that? Risky is basically your normal.“ 

Widowmaker huffed, but said nothing. Sombra stepped in front of her and caught her yellow glance with her own. 

„I‘m serious. You don‘t have to worry, okay? I‘ll make sure nothing goes wrong.“ She made a gesture to encompass the entirety of the building around them. „I don‘t know about you, but I‘m fucking sick of this. I think we‘ve earned a little time off, hm?“ 

She stood on her tiptoes until her height was near equal to Widow‘s. „Live a little, _amiga_. It‘s not that hard, I promise.“ 

Reaching out, she tapped the sniper‘s nose with the tip of a clawed finger. „Boop!“ 

The corners of Widowmaker‘s mouth twitched. Just for a moment, but it was enough. A wide grin spread all over Sombra‘s face. 

„ _Perfecto_. Come on, spider, let‘s get out of here.“ 

\----------------

The streets of Venice were bustling and trembling with life at this time of the year, between Christmas and New Year. In some places, it was almost difficult to find a way through the masses of people, everyone pushing in different directions, everyone with their own plans and places they needed to get to. The shops were open again by now, the more popular ones crowded as ever. Gondolas were being steered along the famous canals with their ice cold dark grey water. It smelled of the food countless street vendors were selling at every corner. The cold air stung in Sombra‘s lungs and her breath emerged in small white clouds, but it just made her smile. As much as she loved Mexico and its hot, hot summers, she also loved this. It was different from everything she had grown up with, but she had grown used to it by now, and it had a certain sharp beauty to it that Sombra could most definitely appreciate. 

Widow, meanwhile, started out looking very uncomfortable where she was, Sombra having to practically physically drag her after her or she might have just run back to the headquarters immediately. It was obvious that she wasn‘t used to being around so many people and that it threw her off guard a lot. 

„Look at it this way“, Sombra told her, arm hooked through hers in a bold gesture that Widow had, for some reason, not shaken off yet, „this means nobody‘s going to look at either one of us too closely. Nobody will notice that there‘s a girl with blue skin running around.“ 

„If you say so.“ 

„Oh, I absolutely do.“ 

Sombra was chipper as always, perhaps even more so. She was thriving in this environment. It had been too long since she‘d been among people, and apparently, her good mood was infectious. It took Widow a while, but eventually she began to loosen up. Some of the ever-present stiffness left her limbs, she stopped walking like on eggshells. Even the frown started lifting off her pretty face. She still regarded her surroundings with a degree of caution that Sombra didn‘t think was entirely called for, but she didn‘t say anything about it. This was Widow‘s first time mingling with ordinary people in years. She was allowed to be a little nervous.

But Sombra was right, nobody paid them any attention. In a city like this, nothing was truly outrageous anymore. And she quickly realized that bringing Widow out here had been one of the best ideas she‘d had in a long time. This kind of anonymity, the opportunity to see without being seen, the glimpse of a part of her she‘d lost connection with a long time ago, all of this was exactly was the sniper had needed. 

Sombra began to understand that when she brought Widow to a halt in front of a street musician, a young man in old, very worn looking clothes with several days worth of stubble on his chin and a guitar in his hands that looked like it was probably a family heirloom. Nonetheless, the smile on his face never faltered for a moment as he strummed his chords and sang the song‘s Italian lyrics with a voice that was easily heard all the way down the street. He had put his open instrument‘s case down in front of where he stood, and occasionally, people would flick a coin or two into it. When Sombra and Widowmaker stopped to watch, a small crowd had gathered around him. 

Sombra rose to her tiptoes once more and brought her mouth close to her companion‘s ear. 

„ _Mira, querida._ “ 

And she did. Sombra watched as Widow‘s golden eyes flickered from the musician to the people everywhere around them. To the mother with one very small child in her arms and a second, slightly older one close to her, staring at the singer in awe, its small form swaddled so much in thick winter clothes that the face was hardly visible. To the old couple right next to them, hands clasped together tightly in spite of the cold. To the small group of teenage girls who were giggling and chatting quietly to each other in Italian, some of them searching the pockets of their coats for some spare change to give. To the man who was standing somewhere in the back all by himself, hands buried in his pockets, lines of sorrow etched into his face, but a soft smile around the corners of his mouth in spite of them. 

Widow looked, and Sombra didn‘t dare make a sound for fear of breaking the spell of the moment. She remained close to her companion‘s side, arm still hooked through hers, hardly breathing, trying to decipher the expression on Widow‘s face. As unreadable as she usually was, now her thoughts were written clearly all over her soft cerulean features. There was apprehension, and a trace of that fear from before. But there was also curiosity, and something that Sombra recognized as awe of what she was witnessing. 

The scene around them could not have been more ordinary. There were probably hundreds of street musicians like this one in Venice, thousands of people just like these ones. But for Widow, all of this was a whole new world, a world she had once known and that had been brutally ripped away from her a long time ago. 

For years, the only things that had followed her wherever she had gone had been pain, fear, and death. The only constants in her life the sting of smoke from a fired bullet, her Widow‘s Kiss bruising her shoulder as it recoiled, a blinking crosshairs on a faceless man‘s head. 

It was all she knew. All anyone had let her know for so long that she had seemed to almost forget that anything else existed.

But there was none of that here. The people around them were happy, they were smiling. There were no bullets. No smoke. The Kiss was resting in its case, locked away in the Armory. No eyes were fixed on Widow‘s face in terror, no screams echoed in her ears. 

The most ordinary thing in the world, and yet, enough to change everything for her, just by existing. Just by _being._

Sombra couldn‘t stop the smile from spreading out over her face. 

„Hey, _araña?_ “, she murmured, just loud enough for Widow to hear her. 

„ _Oui._ “ Her eyes were still transfixed on the crowd of people around them. 

„Do you like what he‘s playing?“ Sombra gestured to the street musician. 

„Do I...“ Her sentence trailed off. For a second, she seemed to ponder the question. 

„I... I think so.“ 

Sombra rummaged around in her pockets for a few moments, until she produced a few loose coins, constituting a few euros altogether. She held them out on her palm. 

„Want to give this to him?“ 

Widowmaker‘s gaze flicked from the money up to Sombra‘s face, then back again. She looked uncertain and a little apprehensive. Sombra nudged her gently with her elbow.

„ _Venga,_ spider. I promise he won‘t bite.“ 

Widowmaker huffed and rolled her eyes. Then, finally, she reached out and took the money from Sombra‘s palm. 

She stepped forward slowly, like she was afraid she‘d break something - or someone - if she wasn‘t careful. The crowd parted to let her through, sensing her motives. Her blue skin caught a few odd glances, but nothing more than that. Cosmetic surgeries that made such things possible as a fashion statement weren‘t unheard of in this day and age. Widow was just a person here - something she hadn‘t been considered by anyone in a very long time, from what Sombra had observed. 

The hacker watched as Widow came up to the musician, her bare hand clasped around the coins. The man seemed to sense that she was nervous, though Sombra doubted he understood why, and he gave her a friendly smile, all the while never stopping in his singing. Widow took a deep breath, bent down a little and flicked the money into the open guitar case. 

The musician‘s smile grew wider and he gave a little bow. „ _Grazie_ “, he told her between two verses. 

Sombra could see Widow‘s eyes widening, just barely, hardly enough for most people to catch it, but it was crystal clear to her. 

She sincerely doubted Widow had gotten to hear something like a simple „thank you“ since she had been kidnapped by Talon. It didn‘t even matter what it was for. It meant acknowledging her not as an object or a possession, but as an equal. A human being. 

Seeing how much something so simple caught her off guard, how much it seemed to shock her, seemed horrifyingly sad and beautiful at the same time. Sad because something so very fundamental to anyone‘s existence should never have been taken away from Widow at all. And beautiful because Sombra was lucky enough to be one who was there to watch her rediscover it. 

She couldn‘t help bouncing on her feet a little in excitement when Widow was back with her. 

„See?“, she told her, grinning broadly „that wasn‘t so hard, was it?“

Widow shook her head. „ _Non_... as much as I hate to admit this, you were right.“

„Oh, shit!“ Sombra laughed. „The scary blue lady admitted that I was right!“

A sigh escaped Widow‘s lips, but Sombra could tell it was just out of pretend annoyance. „You will never let me live this down, will you?“ 

„Absolutely not. I‘m marking this day in all of my calendars.“ Sombra hooked her arm through Widow‘s again, looking up at her with the best puppy dog eyes she could muster. „What do you say we go get some food? I‘m starving.“ 

Widow looked very unimpressed. „You know I do not need to eat.“ 

„Maybe you don‘t _need_ to, but that doesn‘t mean you _can‘t, querida._ “ Sombra was already pulling her in the direction of the nearest food vendor. „Also, I definitely need to, so get moving!“ 

„It‘s like you want me to shoot you on our next mission.“ 

Sombra knew better than to take the half-hearted threat seriously. „Aw, but you‘d miss me if I was gone.“ 

She almost missed the throaty chuckle that Widow couldn‘t hold back. „ _Un petit peu, chérie._ “ 

\----------------

A while later, they were sitting on a bench next to one of the smaller canals, each with a paper cone full of fried fish Sombra had bought for them with the last of the change she had brought. She had given a dramatic bow as she had handed Widow hers, prompting an eye-roll and something that might almost have been a giggle from the sniper. 

Sombra was quite positive that she had never seen Widow as relaxed as she seemed now. No matter how much the outside world had scared her at first, it looked like she had found her place in it again easily. It was obvious how good this was for her. Seeing people as anything other than potential targets must have been difficult for her, a process of relearning something that had once been self-evident. But it was also something she needed to do. 

Maybe Widowmaker could have kept up the life Talon had decided on for her, had the chip inside her head been doing its work properly. Maybe a person who really never felt a single thing could have existed like that. But reality was different. Widow was not nearly as cold as Talon wanted her to be, the facade she wore becoming more brittle every day. She was human, even though they didn‘t want her to be. Sombra was disgusted by the fact that she seemed to be the only person at the base who realized this. 

Talon had done their best to break her when they had taken her from her home and transformed her into a murderer, but if they had not succeeded as thoroughly as they thought back then, remaining this way would to the job eventually. Widow was probably one of the, if not the single most dangerous person Sombra had ever met, absolutely deadly and a flawless combatant. But beneath all that, she was fragile, very much so. All that kept her together was a faint muscle memory of something that had been drilled into her brain by force and that was now falling away more and more with each passing day. 

The thought of what would happen if nothing changed made Sombra‘s insides twist and her heart sting. She wasn‘t sure when she had become this attached to the sniper. She remembered the time well when Widow had barely been able to stand her. But along the way to where they were now, something had changed. 

Widow didn‘t just tolerate her. She _trusted_ her. As far as Sombra could tell, she was the only person within Talon - and possibly the only person in the world - Widow let her guard down around. In recent times, she had come to Sombra‘s room more and more often, the hacker assuming initially it was because of the refuge from Talon‘s supervision it provided. But she had gradually come to realize Widow came equal parts for that, and for Sombra herself. 

She deliberately sought contact with her. That was more than just unique. That was a small revolution all in and of itself. 

Sombra had always been drawn to revolutionaries. 

The thought shot through her mind as she scooted slightly closer to Widow on the bench, resting against her side. Widow didn‘t recoil, instead leaning into Sombra‘s touch. 

She decided to take a leap of faith, and lowered her head to lay on Widow‘s shoulder, heart pounding in her chest. After an instant that felt terribly drawn out, she felt the other woman gently bury her nose in Sombra‘s hair, heard her deep intake of breath.

For just a moment, everything seemed to fall into place. For just one breath, Sombra felt she held all the pieces she had been looking for at the tips of her fingers. Like something had suddenly come to her that she hadn‘t been entirely aware was missing, but now that she had it, she despised the thought of letting it go. 

The spell was broken, of course, when a group of shouting children ran past them a few seconds later. Sombra sighed, not moving away from Widow. There was no warmth radiating off of her, but there was something infinitely comforting in her touch. Sombra almost felt bad for enjoying that. She knew the sniper‘s ever-present calm wasn‘t something she had chosen herself. 

She watched a gondola float past them slowly, the same kind that had already navigated the canals of Venice centuries prior. The normalcy of it all was sobering, in a way. 

„We should do this more often“, she told Widow quietly. She heard a soft sigh escape the sniper‘s lips. 

„I wish that was possible, _chérie._ “ 

Sombra had noticed the new nickname - in fact, she was fairly sure her heart skipped a beat every time Widow said it. 

„It is.“ She shrugged. „It‘s just a little tricky.“ 

Widow glanced down at her. „You had to shut down the entire base just to get us out of there for a few hours.“ 

„Details.“ 

Sombra popped a piece of fried fish into her mouth. Widow had already finished hers, almost devouring it with a hunger that Sombra hadn‘t been expecting. It seemed the sniper really did get barely anything to eat. She didn‘t really need it, of course, with all the vitamins and other nutrients she was administered regularly. But that didn‘t mean it was the same as eating real food. It seemed that Widow had missed it quite a bit. 

(Of course she had, she was French.) 

„I‘m serious“, Sombra continued. „I‘ve missed this - being around normal people, you know?“

Widow hummed in acknowledgment. 

„And I feel like this has been really good for you, too. Talon‘s making a big mistake in keeping you locked up in that concrete block all the time.“

„Perhaps. But I do not think they care very much about my... hm-“ She seemed to struggle for the correct word. „My mental state, I suppose. As long as I function, it does not concern them.“ 

„Yeah, well, it fucking should.“ Sombra couldn‘t keep the irritation out of her voice. „They can‘t keep treating you like some subhuman piece of shit forever.“ 

„What would stop them?“ Widow sounded tired. 

„I would.“ 

The words were out before Sombra could stop them. Widow turned her head, staring at her in surprise. 

„ _Qu‘est-ce que dis-tu?_ “ 

„I‘m saying that I‘m having real trouble just standing aside and watching them do that to you.“ Sombra‘s voice was quiet, but firm. „I‘m not sure why it‘s so hard for those dickheads to understand that you‘re not a goddamn object, but I do, and this... this just isn‘t right.“ 

Unexpectedly, Widow reached out for Sombra‘s hand and gently laced their fingers together. 

„And here I was, thinking we had hired a hacker, not someone who would try to steal Talon‘s best asset away from them.“ 

A laugh escaped Sombra. It was almost the exact same thing Widowmaker had said to her at the chemical factory, back on that disastrous mission from months ago. 

„Hey, _chica_ , I never said I would do such a thing.“ Although the part of her that wanted to wasn‘t too small. „Maybe I can try to convince them to give you more freedom. Maybe they‘ll let you out of the base sometimes.“

Widow shook her head. „I doubt they would want to relinquish their control over me like that.“ 

„Did you hear what Gabe said about that guy they were planning on breaking out of prison soon? He said he would probably change a lot of things about Talon when he‘d be back. Maybe he‘ll...“ Her sentence trailed off.

„Akande Ogundimu. Doomfist.“ 

Sombra cast her a surprised glance. „You know him?“

„He was incarcerated about a year after I joined Talon. Truthfully, he is quite different from the other members of the Council.“ Widow‘s brows were drawn tightly together in thought. „I suppose there is a chance he will be more... reasonable in this aspect.“ 

Sombra perked up immediately. „Really?“ 

„Not a _big_ chance.“ 

„Don‘t be such a pessimist.“ Sombra waved her hand dismissively. „I‘ll take care of it, trust me. Can‘t let you rot in that hellhole, _mi pequeña araña._ “ 

Widow was quiet for a moment. Sombra‘s head was still resting on her shoulder, unperturbed by the cold breeze that had started to pick up around them. She was comfortable just like this. 

„Why do you care so much?“ 

Widow‘s question came out softly, enough so that Sombra almost missed it. She looked up at the spider in surprise. 

„Why shouldn‘t I care?“ 

„Because I am an unfeeling human weapon whose only purpose is to kill, for starters.“ There was bitterness in her voice. 

Sombra scoffed. 

„One, your purpose is whatever the fuck you want it to be.“ She chewed on her last piece of fish, almost angrily so, like it was the fish‘s fault that Talon was made up of nothing but ruthless scum. „Two, you‘re not a weapon, you‘re a person. A murder-y person, but a person nonetheless.“ Swallowing and bunching up the empty paper cone, she snapped her fingers. „And three, you are _not_ unfeeling and you know it.“ 

„What makes you so sure?“ 

Sombra squeezed her hand, the cold blue fingers still interwoven with hers. „Something tells me you wouldn‘t be here if that was the case.“

A chuckle that sounded slightly painful escaped Widowmaker. „Which is precisely why I should not be here.“ 

„But you want to be here, _araña._ “ Sombra sat up slightly and looked into Widow‘s eyes, her expression serious. „Listen - I know they‘ve been telling you that what you want isn‘t worth shit. But that‘s not true, you need to understand that. You have a right to choose.“ 

Widow returned her gaze. There was something behind her eyes that Sombra couldn‘t pin down, something she couldn‘t quite describe. It sent a shiver down her spine. 

„You know, when you first came to Talon I never would have guessed you to be so passionate about such things.“ 

„Let‘s just say I know what it feels like to be treated like you‘re worthless.“ 

She averted her eyes for a split second as memories of a childhood on the dirty streets of Dorado‘s ruins threatened to overwhelm her. Then she caught herself, and looked back up into Widow‘s eyes with something almost like childish defiance. 

„I mean, I‘ve been in that place where people didn‘t care about me, or the things I had a right to. What Talon did to you is about a thousand times worse than that. And maybe I‘m a fucking asshole, but, like, there‘s a line. And I‘m pretty sure Talon crossed it with you.“ 

She took a deep breath.

„And also... you know, you‘re just pretty cool.“

Widow looked at her incredulously. „I am. Pretty cool.“ 

Sombra‘s smile was almost sheepish. „Yeah. I mean, don‘t get me wrong, you‘re weird as fuck-“ 

Widow huffed. „ _Merci beaucoup._ “ 

„You‘re welcome - anyway, you‘re weird as fuck, but honestly? That‘s kind of what I like about you.“ 

The spider had turned around until she was fully facing Sombra. That strange look was still there in her yellow eyes. 

„You know“, she murmured, „you are an enigma, _petit ombre._ “ 

„Gotta do something to earn the name, don‘t I?“, Sombra teased. 

At some point Widow‘s hand free hand had found its way to the small of her back. The touch was light, but Sombra was hyperaware of it even through the layers of fabric that she wore. 

„Have I ever thanked you for saving my life back at that factory?“ 

„Nothing to thank me for.“

Widowmaker chuckled slightly. „Oh, but there is, _chérie_. I am quite sure most agents would have only saved themselves in the same situation.“ 

„Huh.“ Sombra shrugged nonchalantly. „You know I‘m not most agents.“ She grimaced at the thought. „ _Gracias a dios_. Can you imagine how _boring_ I‘d be?“ 

A smirk tugged at the corners of Widow‘s dark blue mouth. „I am finding it difficult to imagine you being boring in any scenario.“

„Aw, _chica!_ Is that a compliment I hear?“

„Maybe.“ For a moment, the smirk grew wider, a sight wholly unfamiliar on Widow‘s face. It looked good on her, though. Really, really good. 

„ _Pourtant_ , I am being serious, Sombra“, she said then, and her face was even once again. „Thank you. For saving me, and... for what you said later in the hangar, as well.“ 

The memory still made a scowl taint Sombra‘s features. „The motherfucker deserved it. And a good punch or two to the face as well. I only regret I didn‘t deliver those along with the insults.“ 

„Do not tell anyone I said so, but - so do I.“

Sombra raised her brows. „Meaning you want me to punch him or you want to punch him yourself?“

Widow tapped her chin with a slender finger. „Is it too much to ask for both?“ 

Sombra burst out laughing. „Not gonna lie, I don‘t think it is.“ 

For a moment, she allowed herself to let her head drop forward, her forehead coming to rest against Widow‘s shoulder. The spider was still towering over her when they were both sitting. Sombra couldn‘t help but notice her height was perfect for her to press her nose into the crook of Widow‘s neck, close her eyes, breathe in her scent. Widow never smelled like other girls Sombra had known, like flowers and fruit and pretty things. She smelled like nothing the hacker could ever put her finger on, except for an ever-so-slight trace of smoke that never seemed to vanish, faint enough not to be unpleasant, but present nonetheless. Sombra had grown used to it over the course of the last few months, even though it was only recently that Widow had allowed her this degree of closeness. By now, it was comforting more than anything to her, just like the cold touch of her skin. 

She felt Widow gently combing through her hair with her fingers, obviously not actually with the intention of detangling it. Sombra took no issue in it. The soft pressure on her scalp felt oddly pleasant, and the knowledge that it was Widow and no one else touching her, in this strange intimate manner, even more so. 

„I cannot begin to understand why you would do... all this for me.“ 

The spider‘s voice was soft, close to Sombra‘s ear. 

„I think I cannot begin to understand _you_. I am so detached from feeling, and you are so... so full of it...“ 

_That‘s what I thought about you and the person you used to be_. But Sombra didn‘t dare say it out loud. She had her arms wrapped loosely around Widow, eyes still closed, wishing with every fiber of her being that she would never have to let go, even though she was perfectly aware how childish the thought was. 

„But despite that“, Widow continued, „it is you who has made me realize that I am missing something. You are the first person who has told me they wanted me to choose, not to simply do as they said. I have never been able to see the mistake in this before you... you...“ 

She seemed to struggle for words, eventually giving up with a deep sigh. 

„I still do not know what you did. But something is different now. You have made something different.“ 

She paused.

„I like this, Sombra. Being out here. Around people that don‘t either want to kill me or want me to kill someone else for them. Not having to consider every word I speak. _Mais_ , six or seven months ago, I was not aware that I could like anything at all.“

Widow pulled back slightly, twisting a pang of regret out of Sombra‘s heart at the loss. Her brow was furrowed and her eyes filled with the closest thing to raw emotion Sombra had ever seen in her. 

„I don‘t understand why“, she said quietly, „but you have made me miss being human.“

It was such an odd statement. From anyone else, it would have prompted confusion and perhaps even irritation. But coming from Widow, Sombra was acutely aware of the deep meaning it carried. She didn‘t know whether to laugh or cry because of it. 

So she didn‘t do either of those things. Instead, she just tightened her arms around Widow in a hug, and bit back the stinging in her eyes harshly. 

„ _Alors, pour cela, je te remercie_ “, she heard Widow whisper into her ear. 

„You shouldn‘t have to thank me for that“, she choked out. „You... you shouldn‘t...“

„But I do, _chérie._ “ The spider exhaled softly, her breath tickling the bare side of Sombra‘s skull. „ _C‘est la vie, malheureusement._ “ 

Sombra had nothing to reply. She was aware of how odd a picture she and Widow must have been painting for the people around them, but she was beyond caring. Somewhere along the way, this blue-skinned woman had drawn her in irrevocably, with her grace and her tragedy and her cold, and those eyes of molten gold, so hollow and so full of things Sombra could never comprehend at the same time. 

She hated how vulnerable she felt, hated how her eyes burned with unshed tears. But most of all, she hated that she was stuck, she was helpless. Talon had taken everything away from Widow, isolated, tortured and humiliated her, and now what was left of her was so broken that she was in awe of Sombra so much as treating her as a person. 

Sombra had done bad things. But never once had she denied the people she‘d hurt their humanity. She had never treated any of them the way she had been treated as a little girl.

Talon had been a means to an end to her when she‘d joined them. But Widowmaker was making Sombra wonder just how far she was willing to go to reach that end.

She was torn out of her dark thoughts by the soft beeping of one of the alarms on her internal computer. A deep sigh escaped her lips as she reluctantly let go of Widow. 

„Sorry, _araña_ “, she said. „Looks like it‘s time we headed back.“

The alarm was wired into Talon‘s security system, timed to alert Sombra when the lockdown was being prepared to be lifted. They were probably sweeping the building one last time right about now. That gave Sombra and Widow just enough time to return before their absence was noticed. 

They got up from their bench and began walking back to the base the way they had come. The street musician from before was not there anymore. The breeze around them had picked up, biting into Sombra‘s exposed skin.

Neither she nor Widow spoke again until they had reached the edge of the compound. A moment before they stepped back through the gate, Widow stopped Sombra, a hand on her upper arm. 

„Sombra...“ Her voice trailed off. She seemed unsure of how to word what was on her mind. Sombra shoved her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. 

„What‘s the matter, _araña?_ “ 

She sounded tired even to her own ears.

„That day in the hangar, when you defended me against the officer.“

„Yeah?“

„You... you called me Amélie.“ Widow spoke softly, pronounced each word carefully, like she was afraid they‘d break on her tongue.

Sombra remembered the incident like it was yesterday. Remembered the incredulousness and the rage on the officer‘s face. Remembered how the name had rolled off her tongue like it always had been meant to be spoken by her.

She had never used it again, assuming that Widow was uncomfortable with it. It only increased her surprise at the sniper‘s next words.

„Could... could you do it again?“

Sombra stared at her, eyes wide.

„You want me to call you by your old name?“

„A part of me still feels like it _is_ my name. I... miss being called by it.“ 

She looked straight into Sombra‘s eyes as she spoke.

„I know Talon would not do so. Perhaps they would even seek to... punish me for the mere desire.“

She took a step forward, reducing the distance between them to a scant few inches. 

„But I trust you, _chérie. S‘il te plaît_ , do this for me.“

Sombra, transfixed by their closeness, and by Widow‘s golden gaze locked on hers, took a second to answer. 

„Of... of course. Sure. I can do that.“

At the very least when no one was listening.

A smile graced Widow‘s - no, Amélie‘s - face, and Sombra was sure it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life.

Amélie leaned in and pressed her cold lips to Sombra‘s forehead. It was brief, but it effectively stopped the hacker‘s heart for a moment.

„ _Merci, petit ombre.“_

 _„De nada_... Amélie.“

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translations: 
> 
> "pourquoi?" - "why?"
> 
> "mira, querida" - "look, darling"
> 
> "venga" - "come on"
> 
> "grazie" - "thanks"
> 
> "un petit peu, chérie" - "a little bit, love"
> 
> "qu'est-ce que dis-tu?" - "what are you saying?"
> 
> "mi pequeña araña" - "my little spider"
> 
> "merci beaucoup" - "many thanks"
> 
> "gracias a dios" - "thank god"
> 
> "pourtant" - "however", "nevertheless"
> 
> "mais" - "but"
> 
> "alors, pour cela, je te remercie" - "so, for that, i thank you"
> 
> "c'est la vie, malheureusement" - "unfortunately, that is life"
> 
> "s'il te plaît" - "please" 
> 
> (wow i kinda went overboard with the other languages this chapter ashdfjshdfjdshfs)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go folks - this is the big one, if i may say so, it's THAT chapter, the one we've all been waiting for... without spoiling anything, i hope you enjoy this as much as i enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> soundtrack for this chapter, especially the first part, is ciara's cover of paint it black: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYPWxymohWs this time i'd actually really recommend listening to it while reading, i think it adds to the atmosphere a lot.
> 
> trigger warning for pretty explicit descriptions of torture and medical trauma.
> 
> enjoy!

The decryption of the last part of Amélie‘s file was finished eight days later.

Just a few weeks earlier, Sombra would have been overjoyed, giddy with excitement at finally finding out what she had waited for for almost half a year. But when she had first set her computers on that file all that time ago, Amélie had just been Widowmaker to her. She‘d had no idea what was really hiding behind that cold, flawless facade, what had been done to her, what Talon had tried to make her into. 

Who she still was in spite of their best efforts.

Amélie had been a research project and nothing more. But that was then. And now she was... Sombra had no idea what she was to her now. A friend, maybe. Maybe something else entirely. It didn‘t really matter. All Sombra knew was that something stung hard in her chest every time she looked at Amélie, and the thought of Talon ever laying hand on her again made her want to scream. It was a troubling realization, to say the least. She knew she couldn‘t help her if her superiors ever decided she needed to be reconditioned. Challenging their orders would have more likely than not cost Sombra her life. 

She‘d gone through the scenario in her head a thousand times over, spent nights laying awake because she couldn‘t stop overthinking it. What she would do if it ever came to that. She couldn‘t seem to find a solution and it was eating her up inside. She was supposed to be able to solve any problem. So why couldn‘t she solve this? 

She didn‘t understand it. She hated it. Every time Amélie sought her touch in the moments when nobody was there to catch them, every time she felt those cold fingers brush hers for a heartbeat, she wanted to cry. 

There had to be an end to this. Sombra couldn‘t continue being an overly emotional wimp that lost all of her carefully crafted composure around a doomed blue woman. A doomed blue woman with the most beautiful eyes Sombra had ever seen, and a smile that was incredibly rare and yet made her heart lose its rhythm every time she saw it. 

It wasn‘t properly beating either when she sat in front of her screens and clicked to open the last part of Amélie‘s file. But now there was no pleasure in it, no surge of happiness to accompany it. There was just a dull uneasy feeling in the back of her mind, and a trace of fear that she couldn‘t seem to shake off. 

A folder opened on her central screens. What it contained was one short text document, and videos. Dozens of them, none of them designated with anything other than the letters A.L., followed by a number. 

Sombra could guess what the letters stood for. They were Amélie‘s initials. 

A terrible feeling started to settle in her stomach. There were no thumbnails to showcase what the videos contained, but Sombra was starting to suspect something anyway. It made her hands shake as she clicked on the text document.

It was just a short paragraph that Sombra had skimmed over in a matter of seconds. 

_The following video files were filmed during the reprogramming and conditioning process of Subject 204 in the course of PROJECT:LACROIX. They contain highly sensitive information that is not to be further distributed under any circumstances by anyone in any way._

Subject 204. They had given her a number. Like she was a lab animal. Like she was a thing. 

Sombras hands clenched into fists, so hard her metal fingernails dug painfully into her palms. She felt bile rising up from her stomach, hastily swallowing it down. For a brief moment, she wondered if Gabriel knew about all of this, but then again, what would it change if he did? It was still too late to do anything about it. This documentation of something that never should have happened in the first place would still be hovering here above Sombra‘s desk, waiting for her to open it. Waiting for her to finally turn her head and look straight into the abyss she had tiptoed around for so long. 

She exhaled and opened the first video. Her hands were shaking and her heart pounding painfully against her ribcage. 

A face appeared on her middle screen, framed by short red hair, full of sharp edges, pale and colder than Amélie‘s could have ever hoped to be. Sombra recognized the woman after a second. It was Moira O‘Deorain, Talon‘s lead scientist and doctor. Sombra had met her a few times. She didn‘t remember them all too fondly. From what she had been told, Moira was a genius, and Sombra didn‘t doubt that, but she recognized cruelty when she saw it. Moira had no empathy for other human beings whatsoever. All she cared about was her research. It didn‘t surprise Sombra that she had been involved in this. 

_„Test subject number 204 was brought in for examination yesterday. Physical condition is stable, psychological one distraught, but manageable. Age: Twenty-six years. No recorded physical diseases. Status: civilian. Threat level: considered miniscule.“_

The installation switched, the camera now focusing on a woman Sombra recognized as Amélie after a moment. Her skin was bloodless and unhealthily pale, but it was decidedly not blue. Her hair was pitch-black as ever, though not nearly as long, and hanging loosely around her shoulders. There were bruises and bloodstains on her narrow face, her features twisted with a mixture of terrible fear and anger. She was wearing what looked to be some sort of hospital gown. Her hands and feet were tied to a metal chair standing in the middle of a small room with smooth white walls. There was no one in there with her, but Sombra recognized the room for what it was - an interrogation cell. Or rather, a modern torture chamber. 

_„What is your name?“_

The voice seemed to come out of nowhere, the sound of it slightly metallic. 

_„Amélie Lacroix.“_

_„That is not your name anymore."_

Amélie bared her teeth at no one. Sombra guessed that someone was watching her from behind a one-way mirror this very moment. 

_„Says who?“_

Her accent was even thicker than it was now. Despite her bold words, the fear in her voice was obvious. 

_„Do you not know who we are?“_

_„Bien sûr que oui. You are Talon. You are... terrorists. My husband has been hunting you for a long time.“_

_„Do you know why you are here?“_

She scoffed, doing her best to look haughty and failing utterly. _„For hostage purposes, I suppose.“_

_„Wrong.“_

The sound of a door being opened was heard, and a man in a pristine white lab coat appeared. He neared Amélie in her chair, carrying something that looked disturbingly like a cattle prod. 

_„What is your name?“_ , the voice demanded again.

_„Amélie Lacroix.“_

The man flicked a switch and pressed the prod into her side. She cried out in pain, flinching sharply as what Sombra recognized as a strong electric shock passed through her body. 

_„What is your name?“_

She gave the same answer. The prod hit her again. Another scream. The question was repeated. Answer. Prod. Scream. It was a cycle that seemed to continue endlessly, with the electricity being turned up every time. After a while, another door opened and Moira entered with an assistant who was pushing an IV stand, the plastic bag attached to it filled with a clear fluid. Sombra doubted it was as harmless as a saline drip. 

The cycle of questions, answers and screams continued while the assistant began to set a needle in Amélie‘s arm and attached the IV to it. Moira kept talking all the way through it, ignoring Amélie‘s pain completely.

_„This, my dear, is a solution I have devised myself. It is made up of a variety of chemicals I don‘t suppose you will be familiar with, not that it matters. What matters is its purpose.“_ She gripped Amélie‘s chin in a claw-nailed hand and roughly twisted her head so she was forced to look at her. _„This little magic potion will do nothing but one thing: cause you pain. The more we inject, the worse your pain becomes. It does not actually physically harm you, therefore we can use it as much as we like. I do believe you might want to begin spitting out some answers that your superiors want to hear.“_

There were tears running down Amélie‘s face, mingling with the blood it was smeared with. Sombra didn‘t want to know how it had gotten there. She felt very cold suddenly.

_„They are not my superiors.“_ Amélie all but choked the words out. Sombra couldn‘t help but admire her defiance in the face of such a terrible fate. Moira shook her head and tsk-ed disapprovingly. 

_„Oh, but they are, my dear. And you had better get rid of that attitude before things become even more painful for you.“_

The same question from before rang through the speakers again. Amélie stammered the same answer. The same electric shock wracked her body. Her screams echoed off the deceitfully white walls. 

Sombra watched in horror as the cycle continued on and on and on. Gradually, Moira and her assistant turned up the dose of the fluid that was being injected into Amélie‘s veins. At some point, the questions she was asked changed. They concerned her husband, his affiliation with Overwatch. Amélie refused to answer any of them. Sombra knew that there was no point to it anyway. Talon already knew the answers to everything they asked. This was about causing Amélie pain and nothing else.

Sombra didn‘t know how long the mock interrogation went on. Amélie remained defiant almost until the very end, even when shaking with spasms from the shocks all over and barely able to speak. There was a glint in her hazel eyes, glassy with pain, that made it impossible to miss that she and the blue assassin Sombra knew were the same person. It was much the same expression she had worn when defending Sombra from the guards at the chemical factory. 

Sombra didn‘t realize she had been holding her breath until it all but left her lungs when the question was asked a final time and Amélie didn‘t answer as she had the whole time. 

_„Number 204“_ , she croaked out, the word barely intelligible. _„My name is... Number 204.“_

The shocks ceased. Moira nodded slowly, and her assistant moved to take the IV out of Amélie‘s arm. 

_„Very well.“_ The metallic voice sounded pleased. _„We hope you have learned your lesson. We will be having another... meeting tomorrow. Dr. O‘Deorain, you are to restore her to ideal physical condition until then.“_

_„Certainly.“_ Moira‘s voice was cool. As the assistant loosened the binds that tied Amélie to the chair, she bent down close to the near unconscious woman‘s ear. 

_„That wasn‘t so hard, was it?“_

She received no answer. Amélie‘s head had dropped forward, her sweat drenched hair sticking to her face in dark strands. Her chest was heaving with labored breaths. 

There was a tremble in Sombra‘s limbs as the screen finally went dark, the video having ended, almost as if she, too, had been made to feel the electric shocks of the assistant‘s cattle prod. As if Moira‘s „magic potion“ had infected her blood as well. 

She spent a minute, maybe two, sitting there entirely still, motionlessly, barely breathing. Her mind was reeling with what she had just witnessed, her expanded mindscape doing its best to cope with the onslaught of it and failing thoroughly.

It wasn‘t that she hadn‘t known that Talon went to extreme lengths to get what it wanted. It wasn‘t that she had never seen someone being tortured before. It wasn‘t even that she hadn‘t been aware that something truly horrible had been done to the woman she had gotten to know as Widowmaker. 

But actually seeing it with her own two eyes, witnessing the full extent of that cruelty, was something entirely different than reading about it, even hearing about it. It was different to see Amélie‘s beautiful features contorted with agony, see tears run down her checks, that person Sombra knew as someone so strong, so seemingly unbreakable, suddenly so frail, tied to that metal chair. So vulnerable. So helpless. 

A victim. 

It filled Sombra with a cold fury that was freezing her blood and setting it alight at the same time. Her face was an expressionless mask, her eyes staring right through the dark holoscreen. A none too small part of her was overcome with the burning desire to open Talon‘s servers right now, rip through the firewalls that she‘d written herself, and put every piece of intel on the organization, its agents and its missions on the open web. And then take her SMG and see what the Talon commanders would look like with holes in their foreheads. 

But she did not, no matter how much she wanted to. She kept sitting in her stupid, useless chair in front of her stupid, useless desk and clicked on the second video with her stupid, useless hands. She already hated herself for it before the file could even fully open, but she couldn‘t interrupt it. Couldn‘t find the strength in her to close the video before it was too late.

So she watched. And she kept watching, video after video after video.

In the second one, Amélie was strapped to an examination table, covered only by a thin paper sheet. Moira was there with her. She injected her with several different chemicals, observing the often devastating effects with controlled coldness, a syringe of nanobiotic fluid ready in her hand. Twice, Sombra watched one of Amélie‘s limbs turn black and wither away before the fluid pushed the necrosis back. Moira was using her as a lab rat, testing out experimental chemicals she had developed on her, the assurance in the back of her mind that she‘d be able to bring her patient back from almost anything her little cocktails could do to her. She never gave Amélie more than a minute to recover until the experiments recommenced. Sombra caught her humming a little tune to herself as she fiddled with some test tubes, while Amélie was writhing on the table, screaming. 

The screams were the worst part.

They seemed to fill Sombra‘s room up even when she turned the volume down. She was tempted to shut it off completely, but she was quite sure that she still would have heard the agonized cries of the woman she had come to care for to such an unreasonable degree inside her head. She was quite sure she would never forget. 

She kept watching, and the images she saw burned deep into her mind. 

Images of Amélie on cold steel tables like this one, surrounded by Moira and teams of scientists, sobbing with inhuman agony. 

Amélie with dozens of hair-thin needles emerging from her scalp, monitors in the background showing every last synapse in her brain, her eyes half-closed, silent except for the odd quiet sob. 

Amélie in perfectly white interrogation cells, body wracked by electric shocks, or desperately gasping for air as the oxygen was withdrawn from the room, or cowering in a corner, knees drawn tightly to her chest as various noises were blasted at obscene volumes through speakers in the ceiling. 

Amélie in the tiny cell she was forced to sleep in, where the ceiling wasn‘t high enough for her to even sit up properly, skin almost as blue as it was now with bruises. 

Amélie, strapped to a chair, an IV with the same clear fluid from before in her arm, images and videos playing on a screen before her, showing agents of Overwatch, people she loved. The dose was increased with each passing minute. Her cries got louder with each passing minute. Only the metallic voice remained the same, telling her over and over that those people weren‘t her friends, that they were enemies, targets, nothing more than bags of meat and bones to be struck down by a bullet and left to rot.

Amélie on steel operating tables, an oxygen mask on her face, limbs strapped down. People around her, monitoring her vitals, handing surgery tools to Moira, who was wearing a surgical mask and gloves as she cut Amélie open, again and again and again. Her limbs, her torso, her head. Sombra couldn‘t tell what she was doing. It didn‘t matter.

Amélie screamed. She screamed and shouted and shrieked and cried, incessantly, ear-piercingly, painfully. Sombra watched as Moira performed open-heart surgery on her and didn‘t even give her one drop of anesthetic, her hands using the scalpel swiftly and skillfully, completely unperturbed by the unspeakable pain of her victim. 

At some point, the screams stopped. Sombra recognized the dating of those videos. They had been taken after the murder of Gérard Lacroix. 

The Amélie from those videos was not the same as from before at all. Her eyes were empty, hollow. She didn‘t struggle anymore. Didn‘t defy Moira and her team of scientists or the metallic voice from the speakers.

But Sombra saw what they did to her. She watched them drill holes into her skull and implant the tiny chip in her amygdala that shut off her hormone production. She watched them open her chest and put a device around her heart that held it in a vice like grip, only letting go four times a minute. Allowing no more than the bare minimum that she absolutely needed to survive. Sombra watched them insert tiny wires into Amélie‘s muscles, watched them inject her with millions of microscopic nanobots that kept her alive now that her body couldn‘t anymore. She watched them cut off her legs below the knee despite nothing being wrong with them, to be replaced by cybernetics that would allow her to run around and jump and fall from great heights and still survive somehow. 

She watched her skin turn blue, as in the background her vitals on the ever-present monitors started to change. Four beats per minute. Miniscule blood pressure. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit body temperature, standard. 

In the last video, she was laying on a table with her bare back facing up, face turned to the side, expression completely flat as the spider tattoo Sombra had gotten to know so well was etched into her bloodless skin. She wasn‘t tied up anymore. That wasn‘t necessary. Talon had broken her. She would never struggle against them again.

At least, that was what her new superiors had apparently assumed back then. 

The thought of Amélie was the only thing that kept Sombra from snapping completely as the video closed. Amélie, beautiful enough to hurt her eyes, her touch like ice and her heart not made of the same material no matter how much Talon wanted it to be. Amélie, a stitched up puppet coming apart at the seams, with the tech that had kept her together for years malfunctioning, the humanity Talon had sought to extinguish forever returning. 

Amélie, the only person in the world Sombra cared about more than she cared about herself. 

If Sombra got up and went to shoot Talon‘s leaders now, it was the spider who would suffer for it. The only way to protect her right now was to hold still, no matter how much it was killing Sombra inside. 

Something was burning inside her that she couldn‘t describe, something she had never felt before, far beyond rage, far beyond disgust. It made her want to wreak havoc, to tear Talon down with every miserable brick, set the ruins on fire and dance on the ashes. 

Her screens, glowing violet in the darkness of her room, seemed to almost beckon her. _You can do it_ , they whispered in her head. _You know you can. At the press of a few keys, you can destroy them. You can make them pay for what they did to her._

Sombra didn‘t think she had ever wanted to do something as much in her life. It took all of her restraint not to, but somehow, she managed to keep her hands off the keyboard, keep the racing thoughts in her expanded mind in line. That was the issue with being a living computer. If she couldn‘t control herself, she could very easily think up commands on the spot she never would have implemented with even an instant of serious consideration. 

She kept the flames that were starting to lick at Talon‘s foundations at bay for now. But she still pushed herself up off her chair, driven by a force almost beyond her control. When she left her room and stepped into the dark corridor outside, she checked the lock on her door twice before hurrying down the hallway with quick, soft steps. She knew where her path would lead her without ever having consciously decided on it. 

Before long, she was standing in front of Amélie‘s door, knocking on it once, twice. The door opened after a moment, just enough for the inhabitant of the room to peek through cautiously. 

_„Quoi...“_

„Hurry, _querida_ , let me in.“ Sombra cast a nervous glance over her shoulder. Nobody had seen her come here, had they? 

Amélie seemed to sense her distress, stepping aside to let her slip past the door. Sombra hastily closed it behind her, before she abruptly realized that she had never actually been inside Amélie‘s room before. Their little talks, the times Amélie had come to her seeking refuge from Talon‘s unforgiving eyes, had always taken place in Sombra‘s room, for reasons of simple practicality. There had been no reason for Sombra to come here. 

She took a moment to look around. The room was a little smaller than hers, and noticeably more plain. While Sombra had made every inch of hers her own, littering everything with flash drives, scrap pieces of hardware, pencils, empty bags of chips and clothes she hadn‘t bothered to put into her closet, this room looked to have been left almost exactly in the condition in had originally been in. It shouldn‘t have come as too much of a surprise. Sombra knew by now that Amélie didn‘t even own any other clothes than the catsuit, the black pants and shirts she always wore off-duty, and her workout outfit. It didn‘t make sense for Talon to let her have many personal belongings.

There was a bed, evidently the same as in Sombra‘s room, the sheets rumpled, as if the occupant had had a rather troubled night of sleep. There was a desk, although it was completely empty, not even a lamp placed atop it. There was a wardrobe that was probably near-empty. Everything was kept immaculately tidy and clean. Except for the bedsheets, there was no sign that a person lived in this room. 

_Probably because the people who gave it to her don‘t consider her a person._

Sombra glanced up. The single lamp on the ceiling looked to have been dimmed, casting a strange half-light across the spartan furnishings. 

She shrugged. It wouldn‘t be a huge loss for anyone involved. 

„ _Apagando las luces_ “, she whispered, and with a buzz and a few sparks flying, the lamp went dark. Its death was accompanied by that of a few dozen bugs and hidden cameras everywhere in the room. Sombra could feel their hum vanishing among that of the thousands of other electronic devices in the building. 

For a moment, the room was pitch black, so dark Sombra couldn‘t see her own hand in front of her face. Then she conjured up a small floating sphere of violet light in her palm, made of the same hard light-derived material she built her screens with. It wasn‘t much, but it was enough to let her see Amélie, who was still standing next to the door. There was a frown on her face, and she looked like she couldn‘t quite decide whether to be irritated or just concerned. 

„Sombra, what is the meaning of all this?“, she hissed. „What are you doing here?“ 

Sombra sighed, running a hand through her hair. A headache was starting to settle in her temples. 

„I‘m sorry, _araña_. Your room is full of bugs, I had to shut them down.“ 

„I assumed as much.“ She was still eyeing Sombra skeptically. „You did not answer my question.“ 

„Okay... okay. Listen.“ She flopped down on the edge of Amélie‘s bed without asking for permission. „I realize how this probably looks to you, but- I... I haven‘t been completely honest with you over the last few months.“ 

Amélie had crossed the room and now sat down next to Sombra, her frown deepening. Her skin looked less blue and more lavender in the light of Sombra‘s little sphere. The hacker noticed suddenly that her hair wasn‘t in its usual ponytail. Instead, it hung around her shoulders in loose, pitch black strands that were so long that they pooled on the sheets and fell slightly over the edge of the bed. The way they framed her face made it look even more doll-like. It had never quite matched the cold, ruthless persona Amélie showed off to the rest of the world. 

Sombra had never seen Amélie with her hair down before, but the sight was absolutely breathtaking. It made her look almost otherworldly, ethereal. 

Sombra didn‘t realize she was staring until Amélie made an impatient gesture.

_„Explique.“_

„Right.“ She took a deep breath. „I‘ve been spending a lot of time decoding the medical files Talon has on you. Specifically on your... transformation.“

Amélie was silent, watching her intently with golden eyes. Her face betrayed no emotion. 

„The different sections were encrypted with different codes, so I had a lot of work to do finding new algorithms for each one and basically had to start all over every time. And I could only read it in separate chunks, never the whole thing.“ 

Her tongue wet her lips nervously. 

„The decryption on the last part was finished a few hours ago. It contained video files of major parts of your reprogramming.“ 

„You watched it.“ Amélie didn‘t pose it as a question, but Sombra nodded in resignation nonetheless.

„I did.“ She briefly buried her face in her hands. She still saw the images behind her lids every time she closed her eyes. 

_„Dios, araña...“_

„It can‘t have surprised you too much.“ Amélie‘s voice was quiet. „You knew it would not be pretty.“ 

„Yes, but ,not pretty‘ really isn‘t a way to describe it!“ Sombra shook her head, the anger from before bubbling up again. „I mean, fuck, I knew they had pulled some seriously messed up shit with you, but this... what they did to you... I never could have imagined...“

„Have you learned nothing in all the time since you came here?“ The pain in Amélie‘s words was obvious. „Talon is capable of anything. I did not think you were naive enough to believe it otherwise.“ 

„I‘m _not_ naive and I didn‘t believe otherwise.“ She regretted the way in which she‘d snapped immediately. „ I just... didn‘t think far enough. I thought I had seen the worst of the human race, you know. Uncovering it is my job. But the things in those videos, _araña_ \- those things would make the worst of the people I‘ve ruined want to throw up.“

„I wouldn‘t know. I do not remember most of the procedures.“ Amélie almost sounded bitter. 

„You don‘t-“ A short laugh escaped Sombra‘s lips. „Should‘ve guessed it. Of course you don‘t remember. Would‘ve driven you crazy a long time ago if you did. Hell, it‘s well on its way to driving _me_ crazy and I only watched the videos!“ 

She felt like an explosive, like a hand grenade held at bay only by the last bit of the pin that hadn‘t been pulled yet. One false move, one tiny tremor, and she would go off, and take everything and everyone around her down with her.

The only thing that held her together was her horrible fear of harming Amélie. There was nothing Sombra wanted more than stopping her from ever being hurt again, by her hands or anyone else‘s. Amélie had gone through more pain than any human could imagine. If she had to feel even one more drop of it in her lifetime, Sombra would not hesitate in tearing the person at fault apart with her bare hands. Even if that person was herself. 

Amélie was silent for a while. Her gaze was directed at her hands, opening and closing mindlessly in her lap. Her hair obscured her face almost completely. Sombra‘s hands itched to reach out and brush it back, but she didn‘t dare, couldn‘t bear the thought of Amélie flinching away from her. 

„Why did you come here?“, the spider finally asked quietly. 

„Well- because I had to do _something!_ “ 

„And what did you think all this would accomplish? Did those videos not give you an idea of... of how irreversible those changes made to me are?“ 

Sombra‘s hands had unconsciously clenched into fists at her sides. „You can‘t seriously expect me to just sit still and be quiet after- after-“ 

Amélie turned her head and looked at her. Her yellow eyes glinted in the dim light. Sombra could have sworn she saw her lower lip trembling. 

„Maybe it is time you learned that sometimes, that is the best thing you can do.“ 

Sombra laughed incredulously. „You‘re kidding me, _araña._ " 

„As opposed to you, I have always been nothing but honest with you.“ 

That stung. A lot. Sombra tried not to let it show just how much. 

„Look“, she attempted to defend herself, „I had my reasons for not telling you about the file.“

„And what are those?“

Sombra struggled for words for several moments, before finally giving up with a deep sigh. „I... I don‘t know. Okay? Are you happy now? I don‘t fucking know and I‘m sorry, I should have told you, but I...“

„You were in over your head“, Amélie stated, „And you didn‘t realize it until it was too late.“

She was right, but Sombra didn‘t want to admit it. The mere thought contradicted everything she had built herself into, everything she had spent years telling herself. She was Sombra. She always knew what she was doing. She was never in over her head. No problem was too complicated for her. Nothing escaped her. She was smarter than everyone else. Her armor was impenetrable, her mind elusive and like a trap for those who dared come too close. 

She was invincible. Sombra was invincible. 

But she didn‘t feel invincible now. She felt like a wounded animal, backed into a corner, fangs bared and claws sharp and yet knowing it wouldn‘t be enough. She hated the fact that she couldn‘t trust herself, hated the restlessness, the burning inside her. Hated her hunger for destruction. Hated herself for being so blind and hated Talon for having taken someone like Amélie Lacroix, someone _pure_ , someone meant for something better, and turned her into their slave. 

Sombra couldn‘t hold still anymore. She had for far too long. It would kill her if she spent even one more day in this block of concrete, this prison with invisible bars. And it would kill Amélie as well. Maybe not as quickly, but it would happen. She‘d whither away day by day and fall apart so slowly nobody would notice until she was nothing but a heap of shards on the ground. 

No. Sombra wouldn‘t let it happen. She didn‘t care what the price was. 

„I‘ll get you out of here.“ The words left her lips like a disembodied force, hardly a part of her. „ _Te sacaré de aquí, lo juro._ “

„You what?“ Amélie didn‘t sound like she believed her.

„You heard me, _araña_. I won‘t let all of this happen anymore.“

There was an instant of silence as Amélie seemingly attempted to comprehend what Sombra had just told her. 

„How?“ A trace of anger that Sombra couldn‘t understand colored her voice. „How in the world do you plan to do that?“ 

„I‘ll figure something out. You know me, I‘m good at that kind of thing.“ She gave the spider a lopsided smile. But to her surprise, it was met with anything but gratefulness or hope.

" _Tu as fumé la moquette._ " Amélie muttered it more to herself than at Sombra, abruptly rising from the bed. She started pacing across the room.

„I thought you prided yourself on being so terribly smart“, she snapped at the hacker. „You of all people should be able to see that you‘re talking... you‘re talking...“

Her words seemed to fail her.

„ _N‘importe quoi_ “, she finally spat out. Sombra didn‘t know what it meant, but Amélie‘s tone gave away that it couldn‘t be anything particularly nice. 

„I thought you understood. I really did. What has gotten into you, Sombra?“

„What the hell has gotten into _you_?“ Sombra was hurt, but more than that, she was confused. This didn‘t match up with any of the possible reactions she had foreseen. „You hate Talon, Amélie! You hate that they‘re keeping you locked up in here, you hate what they made you do! And I know that because you told me. _You_ said that to me!“

„What I do or do not hate is irrelevant!“ Her eyes were wide, her teeth bared slightly. She reminded Sombra of a wild animal now more than ever. 

„Why can‘t you understand that? Whatever you‘re trying to do, it will not work! It cannot work!“

„You can‘t know that.“ Sombra had gotten up as well, trying to get Amélie to stop pacing, to look at her. „You haven‘t even let me finish what I was trying to say.“ 

„It doesn‘t matter.“

„ _Sí_ , it fucking does. You‘re not listening to me.“ She grabbed Amélie‘s shoulders. „I can help you. We can leave this place whenever we want. I can have Talon at my mercy with a snap of my fingers.“

Amélie shook her head. „ _Non... non_ , Sombra, you are still underestimating them. You still can‘t grasp how powerful they are, what they can do...“

„Oh no. Absolutely not. I used to underestimate them, but I don‘t anymore. I‘m prepared to deal with whatever they throw at us. I don‘t care what they cook up. I‘ll find a way.“

„If that was true, you wouldn‘t be here right now.“ She pushed Sombra away, returning to her pacing. 

„You say you want to escape with me somehow. And even if we made it, then what?“ She gestured at herself. „If you read my file, you should know I am barely alive. I am barely human. I couldn‘t even survive without the injections I receive. I can‘t live like a normal person. Maybe you could, if you were careful enough, but I-“

„You think you can‘t live away from Talon“, Sombra cut her off, „because they made you forget how to. _Dios mio_ , Amélie, you barely remember your life before they kidnapped you. Of course anything but this seems unimaginable to you now.“

„I am nothing without Talon!“ 

Sombra flinched sharply. Amélie had shouted more than spoken the words. The panic in her eyes was obvious now.

„All I am is what they made me! I- I murdered my husband in his sleep. All the people that were my friends want to see me dead. I have nothing, Sombra. I am nobody.“ 

Her breath came in quick, shuddering bursts. Sombra saw her hands opening and closing at her sides. 

„Talon made me. Talon owns me. Talon alone decides what happens to me. Talon made me...“ She repeated it again and again, like a mantra. Sombra recognized that the words weren‘t her own. They were what had been drilled into Amélie‘s skull over the years. Sombra had heard the officer in the hangar all that time ago say them to her. It was what they wanted her to believe. 

But it wasn‘t the truth. Sombra just had to remind her of it.

She walked over to Amélie and gently, very gently, took her face between her hands. Her skin was cold as ever. Sombra felt her tremble even now, as her golden gaze locked onto hers, full of fear and anger and uncertainty. 

„Nobody made you“, Sombra said, very softly, „And nobody owns you except yourself. And maybe Talon used to decide what happened to you, but that‘s over now. Okay? It‘s all over now. Whatever they did, we can change it. You‘re not alone anymore.“

„Do you really believe that?“ There was desperation in her voice. She wasn‘t talking down to Sombra anymore like she had before. She was seeking confirmation. 

„Of course I do.“ She lightly tapped the side of Amélie‘s head, roughly the area where the chip must have been implanted seven years ago. „You and I both know that little thing they put in there isn‘t doing its job properly anymore, no? You‘ve been putting on a very good act, _querida_ , but I know you better than that.“

„You... you...“ Something almost like a mirthless chuckle escaped her. „ _Incroyable_. You really think you know me?“

„Well, if I don‘t, then who does, _araña?_ “ 

„You‘re right. _Mon dieu_ , you‘re right.“ Suddenly, Amélie reached out and pulled Sombra to her, arms wrapped tightly around her. Sombra didn‘t resist. She rested her forehead against Amélie‘s collarbone and bunched the fabric of her top up in her hands, her abnormally slow heartbeat close to her ear. 

„Ooh, she admits it.“ Her half-hearted attempt at a joke came out muffled, but it didn‘t matter. It wasn‘t a very good joke anyway. 

„You are a foolish little woman.“ Amélie‘s voice sounded choked up. „But you- you are all I have, and I don‘t know how to say it, but I...“

Her arms tightened around Sombra.

„ _Ne me quitte pas_ “, she whispered. „ _Je t‘en supplie, ne me quitte pas._ “

Sombra understood. Somehow, she understood, despite hardly speaking Amélie‘s native tongue.

„I‘m here. You‘re not alone. I promise. We‘ll see this through somehow. I‘ll get you out of here and we‘ll think of something. It‘ll be okay. I‘ll make sure it will.“ 

„Why are you doing all of this?“

She sounded so incredulous. It would have been insulting if Sombra hadn‘t known it was entirely justified.

„I have no fucking idea.“ She couldn‘t bite back the chuckle that made its way past her lips. „This is probably the stupidest thing I‘ve done in fuck knows how long. But you know what? I don‘t care. You‘re worth it.“

„How can you believe that?“

She shrugged. „I‘ve told you before. Knowing stuff is what I do.“ After a brief pause, she added: „And besides you... you‘re just important. To me. I want you to stop hurting.“

She took a deep breath. 

„This whole... selflessness thing... that‘s new for me too. I‘m probably not doing it right, but I promise you, I‘m trying. And I won‘t stop until you‘re safe. Even though it‘s probably stupid of me, because I‘m not really... I‘m not really supposed to care about people. But it‘s too late now, so I guess I‘ll just run with it, y‘know?“ She gave Amélie a lopsided grin.

„It seems like we have one thing in common at least.“

„Aside from the purple, you mean.“

Amélie‘s eyes still shone with unshed tears, but her laugh was real this time. „You are an idiot.“ 

„I‘m not!“

„Yes, you are.“

„Am not.“

„ _Oui._ “

„No!“

„You are-“

Sombra kissed her. 

For a split second, ice cold lips were pressed to warm ones, a slow heartbeat against a racing one. Sombra was still clinging to Amélie, the spider‘s arms wrapped around her. She drew in a shuddering breath, Amélie‘s familiar scent filling her senses, and it felt like something exploded behind her closed eyelids. Something that had been brewing for a long time and that she‘d always shoved back down. Something she had now finally, finally stopped denying. The feeling was utterly exhilarating. The ground beneath her feet could have given way in that moment. She would not even have noticed. 

But then she suddenly realized what she had done. Abruptly, she broke the kiss, cheeks flushing bright red, already untangling herself from Amélie‘s arms.

„ _Dios mio_ , I am so sorry, that was terrible, I swear it won‘t happen-“

Amélie didn‘t let go of her. „No“, she breathed. Her pupils were slightly dilated, her lips parted still. 

„Don‘t apologize, _chérie._ “ 

Sombra felt one of her hands come up to tangle in her hair and tilt her head slightly. Before she knew it, Amélie‘s lips collided with hers again, and Sombra‘s mind went blank. She all but melted into the other woman‘s embrace. The cold of Amélie‘s skin was tangible even through the fabric that separated them, but Sombra didn‘t mind. She had grown used to the chill of her touch. It wasn‘t off-putting or strange anymore. It was familiarity and comfort and it was utterly Amélie, and that was all Sombra wanted. All Sombra cared about. 

She felt Amélie lightly sweep her tongue over her bottom lip, questioningly, and Sombra opened her mouth for her without resisting, sighing softly into the kiss. They were already pressed together as close as possible, and yet, it didn‘t feel like enough. Sombra was trembling. Her cheeks still felt very warm, and the multiple thought processes in her expanded mindscape had slowed to a crawl. She didn‘t want to think anymore. Just for this moment, she wanted to allow herself to forget why she was here, what the future held for her and for the woman she was clinging to desperately, whose name she gasped breathlessly between two kisses. She had spent so much time denying herself this. The knowledge that Amélie wanted her here, wanted this as much as she did, sent her mind spiraling, a firework of emotions she didn‘t even have names for exploding within her. 

It was childish, so childish. But more than that, it was beautiful. And there hadn‘t been room for beauty in Sombra‘s life for too long. Amélie had slipped through cracks in her armor she hadn‘t even known existed, and now she was in far too deep to stop her, to undo what had already been done. But it was okay. Sombra didn‘t want to stop. Didn‘t want to let go. 

Finally, she was forced to break the kiss when she realized she had forgotten to breathe. Her forehead was still pressed against Amélie‘s as she gasped for air, her eyes wide open and focused on the golden ones staring back at her. Amélie didn‘t seem nearly as out of breath as Sombra was, but that wasn‘t exactly a surprise. The look in her eyes told the hacker everything she needed to know. 

A smile spread slowly across her face. It was entirely inappropriate in a situation that would most likely literally decide over life and death for the two of them, but Sombra couldn‘t stop herself. She couldn‘t remember the last time she had felt so warm inside.

„Still think I‘m an idiot?“, she murmured, her lips almost brushing against Amélie‘s as she did. A low chuckle escaped the spider‘s throat.

„But of course, _chérie._ You did not think I would forget so quickly, did you?“ 

„Honestly, I don‘t even care. Just tell me you‘ll come with me. Tell me you‘ll let me fix this.“

„I am... afraid.“ 

„So am I.“ Sombra was surprised by her own words, but she realized that they were true. She hadn‘t been this scared in a long time, and she had every reason to. Her life and Amélie‘s were at stake. But that wouldn‘t change if they stayed here. The only difference was that if they just took a chance and tried to escape, at least they‘d go down fighting. Not as slaves, silently in the dark. They‘d take as many of those bastards with them as they could. 

„You‘ve let them treat you like a thing for too long, _mi amor_. And I‘ve looked away for too long. It‘s time we changed that.“

Amélie closed her eyes for an instant, exhaling audibly. 

„ _D‘accord._ “ It was hardly more than a whisper. „If you go, I will go with you.“

A gigantic weight seemed to lift off Sombra‘s shoulders all of a sudden. She knew the worst was yet to come, but they‘d make it somehow. Sombra had survived worse than anything Talon could come up with to get them back, and if Amélie had gone through every horror imaginable a hundred times over and come out bent, not broken, then they could get through this as well. 

„Okay... okay. I‘ll think of something. We should get this over with as quickly as possible, otherwise they‘ll get suspicious. A few days, no more. Then we‘re out of here.“ She reached up and stroked Amélie‘s cheek with her thumb. „How does that sound, _princesa?_ “

„Risky.“

„Isn‘t everything?“ 

She sighed. „Probably.“

It was everything Sombra needed to hear.

\----------------

Outside the room in the dark corridor, a single Talon soldier slowly, very slowly, lifted his ear off the door to which he‘d had it pressed for upwards of ten minutes. His heart was pounding embarassingly hard in in chest. There were drops of sweat on his forehead. He was scared out of his mind that the two women on the other side of the wall would notice him. After what he‘d heard, he was fairly positive he wouldn‘t survive such an encounter.

He set each step impossibly carefully, doing his best not to make a sound even with his heavy boots on the concrete floor. He knew what he had to do. Relying this information to the commander would get him a promotion at the least. 

What would happen to Sombra and Widowmaker, he had no idea. He suspected something unpleasant. But he didn‘t really care. It wouldn‘t be up to him to decide anyway. 

It wasn‘t like how much longer either of them lived would change anything for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (i'm giggling to myself like a maniac as i am posting this)
> 
> translations:
> 
> "bien sûr que oui" - "yes, certainly"
> 
> "quoi" - "what"
> 
> "apagando las luces" - (well i expect most of you know this one but) "lights out" 
> 
> "explique" - "explain"
> 
> "te sacaré de aqui, lo juro" - "i will get you out of here, i swear"
> 
> "tu as fumé la moquette" - "you've lost your mind" (it's an idiom that literally means "you have smoked the carpet", i got this from some random website so i hope no french people declare war on me bc of this)
> 
> "n'importe quoi" - "nonsense"
> 
> "incroyable" - "unbelievable"
> 
> "mon dieu" - "my god"
> 
> "ne me quitte pas, je t'en supplie, ne me quitte pas" - "don't leave me, i'm begging you, don't leave me"
> 
> "mi amor" - "my love"
> 
> "d'accord" - "okay"


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here we are folks! this is the last full length chapter of this story, after this we just have the epilogue to go, which is much shorter. a lot happens in this chapter, and i can tell you that one particular scene here is what originally gave me the idea for this whole story, so this is essentially the heart of it and i do think it came out pretty well. 
> 
> soundtrack-wise i recommend either the same song as last chapter or 
> 
> a) amalee's cover of magia from mahou shojou madoka magica, which may not be everyone's taste but it's very dramatic and i think it's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXtTDbvS40
> 
> b) seven devils by florence + the machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJL5SE1i0u4 
> 
> but even if none of these are your taste, i'd recommend listening to something dark and dramatic while reading!
> 
> trigger warning for serious, partially traumatic injuries, more medical trauma depending on how you define it, and more torture. also lots of minor and one major-ish character death. 
> 
> i would absolutely love to hear what you think of this one, like i said, it's pretty much what made me write the entire story. it would mean the world to me of some of you left me a comment! tell me your favorite line, what you liked, maybe what you didn't like so much, even just a few words make my day, believe me :)
> 
> but either way - enjoy this one, folks.

Sombra fiddled around a little with Talon‘s servers and had it arranged that she and Amélie were set to use the shooting range at the same time the next morning. There was a lot they had to talk about, but above anything else, they had to be careful now. Sombra had minimal time to plan everything necessary for their escape, and nobody else could catch even a whiff that anything was out of the ordinary. Not even Gabe. 

She had to admit she wasn‘t happy about lying to him. Apart from Amélie, he had probably been the only person here that Sombra considered a friend since she had arrived. Sure, he was gruff and didn‘t talk much and he loved to make a show out of how much he supposedly despised Sombra, but she knew better than that. And she was fairly sure that while he was perfectly aware of what had been done to Amélie, he didn‘t condone it, and he tried to help her when he could.

Sombra appreciated that, she did. But Gabriel was loyal to Talon. Whether out of genuine belief in their ideals or because they had some kind of leverage over him - she couldn‘t trust him to keep her and Amélie‘s secret, no matter how much she wanted to. And they simply couldn‘t take the risk. 

Sombra had given herself three days. No more than that. In three days, everything would have to be prepared for them to get out of here. It wasn‘t much to arrange something as complicated and potentially dangerous as this, but Sombra would manage. She had to. Three days felt like way too much to her. She hated every moment she had to spend breathing the air in this building, the same one where Amélie had been forced to endure so much pain. Every time she encountered one of the soldiers or the scientists in the hallways, it took all her restraint not to snap their neck. 

_Soon,_ she told herself. _Very soon._

What exactly they were going to do once they had made it out of Talon‘s immediate reach, they still hadn‘t decided on. Sombra had safehouses and contacts that could have helped them all over the planet. But none of that was worth anything when there was still the glaring problem of how they would keep Amélie alive once she didn‘t have access to Talon‘s weekly injections anymore. Sombra had read in her file that the serum of various nutrients as well as a fresh supply of nanobots, the modified scopolamine drug that kept her subject to Talon‘s orders and several chemicals Sombra couldn‘t pronounce the names of was mostly the only thing that kept her body from giving out completely. Without it, Amélie could survive two weeks, maybe three, until her tissue would start breaking down. 

Sombra had sketched out the vague beginnings of several plans on how to solve the problem, but they were only beginnings. Until it was time to go, she would have to have them figured out. Maybe they could steal some of the pre-prepared serum to at least get Amélie through the first month or two... 

_Or_ , a little voice in the back of her head whispered to her, _you could ask_ her _for help._

_Her_ being Overwatch‘s prized genius doctor, Angela Ziegler. Amélie had somewhat shyly suggested it, Sombra initially brushing the idea off, but now she had to admit that maybe it wasn‘t as nonsensical as she‘d thought. Sure, Ziegler worked for their more-or-less arch enemies, but she was also an altruist by definition, and she had been Amélie‘s friend before her kidnapping. Sombra supposed there _was_ a none too small chance that she would help them. But there was still a considerable risk that came with turning to an organization like Overwatch, and Sombra was reluctant to take it. There was something about immediately running back to another organized paramilitary group after only just escaping from Talon‘s clutches that left a nasty taste in her mouth. 

She was keeping the idea in the back of her mind, to be brought up again later when they might need it. For now, still, she was hoping that time would never come. 

She‘d had to sneak back to her own room not very long after Amélie had finally agreed to her plan. Her EMP had worn off by then and she couldn‘t risk one of the bugs catching any of what was going on. The rest of the night had been spent collecting every little piece of work she had done here, every cipher of data she had assembled, and downloading it all into her secure store. When she was gone, she didn‘t want Talon to be able to use anything of it. 

She started working a mechanism into the firewalls she had written herself, based on a piece of code she had come up with months ago during a fit of sudden inspiration, furiously scribbled onto a post-it note and all but forgotten. Now it finally became useful. It was designed to function essentially as a kill switch to any piece of cybersecurity. After it was introduced, it lay dormant and almost impossible to detect, until it was activated with an individual command that could be given from an outside source. Then it rapidly evolved into a vicious virus that etched through the affected system like acid until nothing was left. 

Sombra couldn‘t wait to activate this one. She had every intention of ruining Talon, and she was more than capable of doing so. Now her secrecy in regards to the boundaries of her abilities paid off. She was sure that none of the Talon higher-ups had any idea of what she could do to them, and that was what would probably save her and Amélie. 

She told the spider as much the next morning at the shooting range, whispered into her ear in hurried, hushed words, carefully turned away from the security cameras so nobody would be able to read her lips. Amélie was wearing her hair up again, looking as perfectly calm and composed as ever. Only Sombra noticed the way her eyes flitted around nervously, the way her hands were shaking just slightly as she held the Widow‘s Kiss, the scope in front of her one open eye. 

The bullet didn‘t hit the center of the target as flawlessly as usual. It wasn‘t off by more than a few millimeters, but it was enough for Sombra to notice. She prayed that nobody else would. 

„Are you sure they won‘t be able to track us?“, Amélie whispered to her as she reloaded the Kiss. Sombra was pretending to be watching her shoot in order to improve her own accuracy. A sketchy excuse at best. She was counting on the Talon security guards not choosing to look at this particular part of footage especially closely. 

Sombra wiggled her fingers a little and rolled her eyes in a vain attempt to cover up her own nervousness. „Don‘t insult me. I‘ve never let Talon touch my implants, and your chip - that‘s electronics, _querida_. I could turn it off right now if I wanted to.“ She snapped her fingers as to illustrate her words. 

A chuckle escaped Amélie‘s throat. „Of course. I should have assumed as much.“ But she still sounded worried.

Sombra sighed. „I- I understand that you‘re scared, believe me. But I promised you I‘d fix this, and I will. Just a few more days. Then this will all be over.“

„I know.“ Amélie pressed a lightning-quick kiss to her temple. „I trust you.“

Somehow, the words simultaneously made her heart speed up and a terrible sinking feeling settle in her stomach. People putting their lives into Sombra‘s hands wasn‘t exactly something she was used to. She‘d been on her own for years before she had come here, and even then she hadn‘t expected to become this... attached... to someone else. Especially not someone like Amélie. 

The spider depended on Sombra, and on her ability to make true on her promise. It was a responsibility the likes of which the hacker had never experienced as far as she could think back. To say it didn‘t make her uncomfortable would have been a lie. 

The small miracle was that somehow, she bit her tongue and swallowed it down and pulled herself together. Somehow, she hadn‘t backed out of whatever this was yet. 

She was finally running again. But for once, she wasn‘t doing it because it was convenient. She was doing it to save someone. 

That was new, and it felt strange. But she wasn‘t going to stop. No matter what it took, she wasn‘t going to stop until Amélie was safe. There‘d be time for self-reflection and a potential identity crisis later. 

\----------------

She left the shooting range a little later feeling terribly heavy and light as feathers at the same time. Amélie would stay there for a bit longer in order to divert any suspicion. They would conveniently run into each other several more times over the course of the next days. They couldn‘t risk more than that. Only more reason for Sombra to despise Talon. 

Once they were out of here, they‘d have to go underground for a while. But at least Amélie would be with her. At least she wouldn‘t have to pretend anymore. 

Footsteps were approaching somewhere behind her, but she paid it no mind, lost in thoughts of the times to come. She cursed herself for her carelessness only moments later.

„Stop right there!“ 

Sombra heard the unmistakable click of a gun‘s safety catch being released an instant before she could turn around. Her hand flew to her own SMG that she was still carrying at her hip, but when she found herself face to face with six heavily armed Talon guards, she abruptly realized it wouldn‘t do her any good. 

They had surrounded her in a matter of seconds, machine pistols pointed at her from all sides. She swallowed down the panic that bubbled up within her. There had to be an explanation for this. Had someone overheard something she‘d said...? 

Her mind jumped to Amélie instantly, and suddenly, she felt very cold. 

„What the fuck.“ She forced the tremble out of her voice, her eyes darting around, trying to find some way to escape. If only she‘d been wearing her jacket. What wouldn‘t she have given for one of her translocators right now...

„Hands behind your head! Now!“ 

Reluctantly, she did as she was told. 

„Okay, what the hell is going on?“ 

„Don‘t try playing dumb with us“, the guard bellowed at her. „Talon knows what you‘re planning. Don‘t try to resist, we have been authorized to use lethal force as necessary!“ 

Another one of them came up behind her, grabbing her wrists roughly and shoving them through a pair of handcuffs. They snapped together with a metallic _clink_ , the steel icy against Sombra‘s skin. The man forced her arms down, twisting them uncomfortably. 

A shock of adrenaline rushed through her as she abruptly realized what exactly was happening here. They knew. Somehow they knew. 

She had to get out of here, and then she had to get Amélie to safety, as quickly as possibly. That was all that mattered. 

She whirled around, wrenching her arms free from the guard‘s grasp. Before he had time to react, she slammed her forehead into his nose, the bone breaking with a disgusting sound that mixed with the man‘s scream. Her hands were still tied behind her back, but she managed to kick into another guard‘s stomach hard enough to make him retch and fall to his knees before one of his remaining compatriots stepped in. 

A single shot rang through the air, and a split second later, white-hot pain surged through Sombra‘s left leg, and she couldn‘t help but cry out. All of a sudden, it didn‘t support her weight anymore, and she fell, landing hard on her side, unable to catch herself with her hands. One of her ribs cracked, but the pain was hardly comparable to that in her leg. She felt blood seep through her leggings and onto the floor.

Sombra grit her teeth, breathing heavily through her nose and trying to keep herself from screaming again. 

„What happened to that lethal force, _cabrón?_ “, she ground out. 

„Don‘t think we will hesitate to use it if you try to escape again. Now get up.“

„Do I look like I fucking can?“ 

She felt rough hands grabbing her shoulders and forcing her onto her feet. Her injured leg threatened to give way again, but this time, the guard next to her kept her from falling. 

„Walk.“

Sombra didn‘t think she could walk. They forced her to, even though a fresh spike of pain made her want to scream every time she moved her leg. God, she didn‘t want to do what they told her, but try as she might, she couldn‘t find a way to escape. She couldn‘t run away, and she couldn‘t get to her SMG either. She was helpless, and she hated it almost more than she hated those men themselves.

Almost.

Later, she could hardly recall most of the way to the medbay. Her mind was half fuzzy with agony and half blank with fear, not for what they would do to her, but what they would do to Amélie. If they knew about what Sombra had done, they knew about her _araña_ as well. The thought of them laying a hand on her was driving Sombra mad. 

She had to do something, anything. There had to be some way she could get out.

By the time they reached the medbay, there were tears of pain and rage spilling down her cheeks even though she was only half conscious, nearly passed out from blood loss. But she did recognize the tall red-haired woman with the mismatched eyes that looked her up and down like a piece of meat when she was pushed through the door and towards a steel operating table, just like the ones in the videos. 

„Took you long enough“, Moira O‘Deorain said to the group of guards. „Don‘t tell me she gave you any trouble.“

„Tried to escape“, one of them grunted. „Incapacitated her.“

Moira eyed Sombra‘s bleeding leg disdainfully. „I can see that.“

Two of her assistants appeared and took Sombra from the guards. She tried to fight them, but could hardly find the strength in herself to lift her head, even less to actually do any damage. There was nothing she could do as the two picked her up and put her on the operating table, with her back facing upwards. They began to strap down her limbs, just like they had done with Amélie all those years ago. Was that what was going to happen to her? Would they make Sombra into a slave too? 

The thought filled her with a morbid, primal kind of fear she had never felt before in her life. She tried in vain to struggle against her constraints. They didn‘t budge even a little bit. 

„You know, Sombra“, Moira said in an almost conversional tone of voice while she flitted around the room assembling her tools, „I really expected better from you. I never liked you, but I did respect your extraordinary intelligence. Now it looks like you aren‘t that smart after all.“ 

From the corner of her eye, Sombra caught her shaking her head disapprovingly.

„Defecting from Talon? Really? After all this time, you should know better than that. And to drag poor Widowmaker into it with you.“ 

A deep sigh escaped her lips.

„She is my masterpiece, you understand - my life‘s work, my greatest accomplishment. Now we will have to put her through reconditioning and in all honesty, even I don‘t know if she‘ll come out of it functionally. All because you thought you could play with us like you play with dense, middle-aged businessmen.“

„Don‘t you fucking touch her.“ Sombra didn‘t bother hiding the rage in her voice. Pain was still coursing through her, pulsating from her ruined leg through her whole body, but it was nothing compared to the blinding fury that Moira‘s words made erupt in her. 

„No offense, my dear, but you don‘t seem like you‘re in a position to do anything about it.“ 

The Irishwoman was hovering over her now, like a bird of prey eyeing a helpless mouse it had already dug its talons into. 

„I don‘t know why you bother with her, anyways. It‘s not like she could ever return whatever it is you think you feel for her.“

„You have no idea who she is“, Sombra spat out. „You don‘t even know her. You say she‘s your _masterpiece_ , but to you, she‘s just a lab animal- just a _thing_. You‘ve been treating her like a piece of shit for seven fucking years and you‘re surprised she wants to run away?“ 

Moira just shrugged, seemingly entirely unfazed by Sombra‘s words.

„You will realize your error soon enough.“

„What are you going to do to me?“ She resented the trace of fear that had crept into her voice.

„We‘re going to make sure you don‘t ever try a little stunt like this ever again. You get the chance to find out first hand what it‘s really like to be the Widowmaker.“

So Sombra‘s suspicions were confirmed. They really wanted to put her through Amélie‘s conditioning procedures. 

Images from the videos she had seen flooded her mind again. Amélie in the white interrogation chamber, body wracked by electric shocks, gasping desperately for air. Amélie on tables just like the one Sombra found herself on now, screaming at the top of her lungs while Moira cut her helpless body open. 

_No, no, no, no, no..._

There had to be something she could do. She couldn‘t let them take her just like this. She was Sombra, for God‘s sake, she had found herself in her share of hopeless situations, and she had come out still kicking every time. If she could survive a childhood on the ruined streets of Dorado, she could hold her own against a megalomaniac sadist like Moira.

Once more, she checked to see if she really didn‘t have any active translocators planted anywhere. Her hopes were disappointed. They were all stacked in her room, their lights dark. Useless. 

She wriggled her wrists, trying to get them into a position where she could use the wires implanted in her hands. Maybe if she could get to Moira‘s machines, disable them... and didn‘t the scientist herself have implants as well? Her left arm definitely didn‘t look exactly natural, with its pulsating purple veins and abnormally long spindly fingers. 

Sombra closed her eyes, grit her teeth and focused entirely on her wires. It cost her every bit of strength she had, but eventually, she managed to get them working, snaking out from her fingertips and moving towards Moira, who still stood with her back turned to Sombra.

But moments before the wires could have touched her arm, Moira suddenly vanished in a puff of purple smoke. Sombra hardly had time to process what had happened when she suddenly felt an ice cold hand digging into the back of her neck, and a hair-thin needle piercing her skin.

„Oh no you don‘t.“ Moira‘s voice had lost its casual tone. Now she just sounded cruel. 

„Widowmaker had to realize this, and you will realize it as well“, she hissed. „The more you struggle, the more pain it will cause you. You had best simply accept your fate while you still can.“

Tears of rage and frustration welled up in Sombra‘s eyes again. She bit her lip harshly to hold them back. 

„I‘ve never been good at _accepting things_ “, she ground out.

„That‘s too bad.“ 

There was one more thing Sombra could think of. Her EMP. She wouldn‘t have to touch Moira to use it on her, and its radius was wide enough to shut down all electronics in the lab. 

One last time, she concentrated, tried to collect the energy she needed to set off the electromagnetic blast. 

She couldn‘t find any.

Her eyes snapped open in horror as she abruptly realized just what Moira had injected her with. One by one, her implants flickered and went dark. She lost connection to her internal computer, the secure store, her artificial spine, the wires in her arms. It was all gone. She couldn‘t call up her screens, couldn‘t access any of her data, couldn‘t find a connection to the web try as she might. Even her aural and ocular implants fizzled out with hardly a fight. 

Sombra felt like her every connection the outside world had abruptly been cut off. Her normal senses all still functioned normally, but to her, it was like she couldn‘t see anything but dark shapes anymore, could hardly translate the sounds coming out of Moira‘s mouth into words. Her mind reeled as it struggled to adapt itself to its newfound vulnerability, every security system Sombra had installed suddenly offline, along with the expanded mindscape. It was like her thoughts had slowed to a crawl.

Never in her life had she felt so helpless, so exposed. Everything hurt, her leg especially, she felt blind, deaf and mute at the same time. She could barely move, barely breathe. 

No matter what Moira decided to do to her, there would be nothing she could do to fight it. She was vulnerable like an infant, and utterly, utterly doomed. 

She only faintly noticed when her shirt was cut away from her back, her mind felt like it was obscured by thick fog. She didn‘t even have the will left to wonder what Moira was doing. 

At least not until that fog was permeated by an angry-sounding humming noise, almost like a drill of some sort. Sombra had no more than a second of horribly slow thoughts to try and process what it was before a searing pain suddenly shot through her back. She couldn‘t stop the scream that escaped her, a wet, distorted noise that broke off midway through it, having soaked up all the strength she had left. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt more than anything she had ever felt in her life, and it was becoming worse the louder the humming got. 

Something warm trickled down her side. She realized belatedly that it had to be her own blood. 

A few moments later, the pain stopped, along with the humming, only to start up again a second later slightly to the right. This process was repeated several times, with the assaulted spots moving up her spine agonizingly slowly. By the time the humming finally ceased and didn‘t start again, Sombra was clinging to consciousness by a hair‘s breadth. Her breathing was shallow, hurried, and her palms burned from where she had dug her nails hard enough into the skin to draw blood. Everything around her was happening too fast, or maybe everything inside her head was just happening in slow motion. She couldn‘t tell the difference. Her mind was unable to understand what Moira was doing to her, until she felt something tear through her skin with a sickening noise and a fresh wave of pain.

„ _Madre de Dios._ “ 

She heard the broken, choked up words like a disembodied sound, not coming from her own bloodstained lips at all. 

Her translocating rig. Moira was ripping out her spinal implants, drilling holes where they had been fused to her body, cutting the wires connecting everything, tearing off the bulky metal bits that were visible on her skin. 

She wasn‘t content with just shutting Sombra down. No, she was going to take Sombra apart piece by piece, and then see if maybe she could put her back together well enough for something to come out of it that she could control. 

„ _¡No, no, no, por favor, basta, me estas lastimando!_ “ 

The words left her lips like they had a will of their own, barely above a whisper. Moira probably wouldn‘t catch them over the disgusting squelching noises of metal tearing through flesh. It didn‘t matter. She wouldn‘t stop, no matter how Sombra begged her to. 

A part of her resented that she was reduced to this - a crying, helpless mess, with nothing she could do other than plead with her tormentor to stop hurting her. But the majority of her consciousness was busy trying to cope with the onslaught on her stunted senses. Her back felt like it was on fire, and every time Moira pulled another piece of metal out, it was like a monster was dragging its scalding hot claws through her flesh. 

Sombra wasn‘t sure how much longer she could stay conscious. Her vision was already beginning to black out.

The pain was enough for her to almost wish the darkness would find her faster.

\----------------

She didn‘t know how much time had passed when finally, through the haze that covered her whole being like a thick layer of black smoke, a noise reached her tingling ears. Not the humming of the drill or the clinking of Moira‘s instruments. Something like a loud crack, or maybe a bang. 

Then a scream. 

This time, it was not her own voice she heard. 

„What-“ 

Moira sounded confused even to Sombra, and alarmed. The tearing in Sombra‘s back stopped. That alone felt like incredible relief to her. 

The noise repeated itself, and the scream too. Again, it was in a different voice. 

Something Sombra recognized as hurried footsteps on the floor became audible. Seconds later, more noise was added to it, grunts and startled yelps and sounds of bodies slumping to the ground.

Sombra‘s heart sped up just slightly. Some of the fog seemed to dissipate, letting her see more clearly. 

Moira wasn‘t standing next to the table anymore, but before Sombra could think about where she had gone, she heard her voice again. She didn‘t sound self-assured anymore. She sounded almost afraid. 

„Do not take another step, I‘m warning you-“ 

„I will take as many steps as I please, whenever I please, _vieille sorcière_ “, sneered a second voice, smooth as silk as yet seething with venom. A voice Sombra would have recognized anywhere, even without the French words she had spoken.

„ _Araña?_ “, she barely croaked out. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Was she already dead or hallucinating or was this reality? Had Amélie really come for her?

„How did you get in here?“, Moira demanded. The panic in her voice was obvious now. A high-pitched laugh escaped Amélie‘s throat.

„How do you think? I killed all the guards outside, and then I killed your assistants, Dr. O‘Deorain, and hopefully you are not naive enough to believe I will spare you.“ 

„What do you even think you‘re doing? I don‘t recall programming you to be an _idiot_ , Widowmaker, surely you don‘t believe you can survive out there-“

„My name“, Amélie hissed, „is Amélie Lacroix, and the only idiot in this room is you for believing you could make me into anything other than that.“ 

A disgusting cracking sound resonated in Sombra‘s ears, and Moira cried out. Somehow, Sombra managed to turn her head enough to catch a glimpse of the scientist slumped against the wall of the laboratory, blood all over her face and hands, her nose oddly crooked and a bloody indent on her forehead. She looked like she was barely conscious. 

„They will find you.“ Her whispered words were colored with bottomless hatred. „They will find you, no matter where you go. You will never be safe. You will never be happy.“

„And you will not be around to witness me proving you how wrong you are.“ The distinctive sound of a gun being cocked sounded through the room.

„You are a sadist, Dr. O‘Deorain. You love hurting people more than anything else. I know this because you have caused nobody as much pain as you have caused me. There is no way you could ever understand how much, and I will not waste my time trying to explain it. But you should know before I kill you...“

Sombra saw her stepping closer to the defeated scientist. 

„You failed.“ 

Amélie‘s voice was oddly quiet all of a sudden.

„You tried to make me a monster, and you failed. The monster of the two of us is you. I will have my revenge. And I will not let you hurt another person dear to me. I will not let you do to her what you have done to me, what you have done to countless others.“

Sombra heard her take a deep breath.

„ _J‘ai gagné, tu as perdu. C‘est la fin. Adieu, Dr. O‘Deorain._ “ 

A heartbeat later, a single gunshot rang out, and silence fell over the laboratory. Sombra only heard her own labored breathing and the sound of her blood pounding in her ears. 

„A-Amélie?“ 

A cold hand touched hers, for just a second. It was almost enough to make Sombra burst into tears. 

„It‘s over, _ma chérie_. It‘s all over now.“

She felt Amélie‘s fingers beginning to work on the straps holding down her limbs. Her right hand came free, then her left, then both her legs. Amélie helped her sit up on the bloodstained table. For the first time since the spider had entered the room, Sombra could see her face. She was still wearing her recon visor and the ponytail, even though a few strands had fallen out of it, now sticking to her forehead. A light spray of blood discolored her cheek, and her golden eyes were wide. 

She had never looked more beautiful. 

Sombra reached out with trembling arms and wrapped them around her, pulling her to her and burying her face in the crook of her neck. Amélie‘s fingers found their way into Sombra‘s hair, gently combing through it just like she had done that day on the bench by the canal. 

Sombra‘s back still burned terribly, but she paid it no mind. She had no tears left, but her shoulders still quivered with silent sobs and Amélie held her, not saying a word, until she finally calmed down a little, enough at least to lift her face off Amélie‘s shoulder and look up at her. 

„You saved me.“ Disbelief colored her voice. „How... how did you...“

„They came for me“, Amélie answered quietly, „they wanted to lock me in my room until they had decided what to do with me. I knew instantly where they would have taken you.“

It wasn‘t hard to picture. Amélie still had her rifle and visor from the training range. With those, she was almost unstoppable. Talon knew that. It was why they normally took her gear away from her as soon as she didn‘t need it anymore. 

Sombra realized how incredibly lucky they had both gotten. Had the guards come for Amélie even a little later, after she had already put her weapons back in the Armory, there would have been nothing either could have done about their fate. 

„I‘m taking this as a sign that some higher force wants us to escape this hellhole once and for all.“ Sombra forced a grin, although even her facial muscles seemed to ache terribly. 

„We will“, Amélie said decisively. „Let me just...“

She stepped away from the table and opened one of the cabinets on the walls, pulling out a bottle of antiseptic and some bandages. With the ease of someone who had had to tend to battle wounds many times in their life, she began disinfecting the wounds on Sombra‘s back and bandaging them up as best she could, and then did the same with her leg to at least stop the bleeding. 

„We will still have to get you to a hospital“, she told Sombra as she tied up the bandage tightly. Sombra shook her head.

„We can‘t, _araña_ , they would never accept someone who looks like us. They‘ll probably just think we‘re dangerous.“

She was slowly getting used to feeling her senses without her implants again, although it was still a considerable difference. A frown had made its way onto Amélie‘s face.

„You might lose your leg otherwise.“

That was not exactly a thought Sombra liked having. But there was no way she would get into a normal hospital, a blood-smeared cyborg with half-torn out implants and a blue skinned woman in tow. 

As she looked around the room in a half-hearted search for a solution, her eyes fell on a small row of vials at the back of the room, filled with yellow fluid. 

„Hey, what‘s that over there?“ She pointed in the direction of the vials, Amélie following her glance. 

„That...“ Her eyes narrowed. „I believe that would be nanobiotic fluid. The kind Talon soldiers are injected with after they are injured so they recover more quickly.“

Sombra weakly snapped her fingers. „And there we have our solution. Just inject one of those into my leg and it‘ll heal up all by itself.“

Amélie‘s frown deepened. „That is too dangerous, we don‘t know anything about how it works. It could damage you further if not administered correctly...“

„Maybe you‘re right, but I don‘t see how we have a choice.“ 

She sighed. „Very well. Pray that it works, _chérie_.“ 

She went over to the storage unit that held the vials, plucked a sterile syringe from a tablet full of medical instruments, and pulled the biotic fluid into it. When she returned with the syringe, she looked extremely unhappy. 

„She has caused us enough pain in life“, she grumbled, eyes flickering over to Moira‘s still form in the corner. „I do not want her to cause us more even in death.“

Sombra did her best not to let her own nervousness show. „It‘ll work out, _araña_. Getting us this far and then having everything fail because of a little bit of healing juice?“ She tapped the syringe with a long nail. „That would be too much of an injustice even for a world like this.“

Amélie did her a favor and didn‘t ask her whether she actually believed that. Instead, she carefully selected a vein in Sombra‘s leg, took a deep breath and pierced the skin with a needle so thin Sombra barely felt it. The hacker watched as the syringe emptied itself in a matter of a few seconds. Almost immediately, a tingling sensation began to spread beneath her skin, and then a slight burning, which was unpleasant but nothing compared to her back. The pain in her leg itself began to subside slowly.

„I think it‘s working“, she told Amélie, obvious relief coloring her voice. The spider nodded slowly. 

„In that case, we should use it on your back as well.“ She was already on her way to get another vial, but Sombra grabbed her wrist and held her back, panic suddenly flaring up within her.

„No! We- we can‘t do that. If the wounds close, I‘ll never get my implants working again. Moira only tore about half of them out, I think. There are probably fractured pieces everywhere, enough to make installing a replacement impossible.“

„ _Chérie_ , your wounds are too deep-“

„ _Please, Amélie._ “ The desperation in her voice was obvious now. „I have to get my implants back. I‘m not whole without them. Everything feels dulled and slow and... and wrong. Just give me a painkiller and we‘ll make it.“

Amélie was silent for a moment. „Where do you even want us to go?“

„My old cyberneticist. She‘s a genius, she‘ll be able to fix it. I know she will.“ 

„Where is she?“

„Hamburg, in Germany. If we take a dropship, we‘ll be there in a few hours. We can make it.“ 

Amélie still didn‘t look happy. But finally, she nodded. „Alright. If you think she can help you.“ 

It was like a gigantic weight had been lifted off Sombra‘s shoulders. All she wanted was to get out of here with Amélie, and to have her implants back on. And then they could see what they would do next. 

„One last thing“, she said. Amélie inclined her head slightly.

„I uploaded a virus into Talon‘s systems. It‘s dormant right now, but I can activate it from any computer in the building.“ She looked over to the desk in the corner of the room, where a dark monitor stood with a keyboard and mouse. „I‘m not sure I can walk yet- if you can get me over there, I‘ll...“

Amélie wrapped one arm around her torso and set the other beneath her knees without a word. Sombra held onto her tightly as she lifted her up, carried her over to desk and carefully set her down in the chair in front of it. Even the little bit of movement had made Sombra‘s head feel fuzzy and warm, but she forced herself to concentrate. She could do this without her implants. It wasn‘t difficult, especially since the computer was only in sleep mode and not secured with a password. All she had to do was open a terminal and key in a command in a coding language no one other than her understood, because she had invented it herself. 

As her fingers tapped softly on the keyboard, Amélie‘s cold hands were resting on her shoulders. Sombra could feel her watching her every move, but it wasn‘t an uncomfortable feeling. This was Amélie‘s revenge as much as it was hers. 

She couldn‘t read the code like Sombra could, but the hacker knew she felt it just as much when she pressed enter and Talon‘s walls began to crumble, piece by piece, until they formed a roaring avalanche that consumed everything in its wake. 

A screeching alarm sounded from the speakers in the ceiling, and red light filled the room. Right at this moment, panic would be breaking out everywhere in the building, people scrambling for their weapons, desperately looking for an intruder, something they could point their guns at, anything. 

There were hundreds of them in the headquarters. Sombra knew that.

But still, she somehow felt untouchable as Amélie carried her out of the bloody lab, her skin red in the light from overhead, the rifle slung over her shoulder and the visor over her eyes. 

The triumph as she tasted the air filled with screams was incomparable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (man even i am so hype about posting this chapter hhhhhhhhhh)
> 
> translations: 
> 
> "cabrón" - "asshole"
> 
> "no, no, no, por favor, basta, me estas lastimando" - "no, no, no, please stop, you're hurting me" 
> 
> "vielle sorcière" - "old witch"
> 
> "j'ai gagné, tu as perdu. c'est la fin. adieu, dr. o'deorain" - "i have won, you have lost. this is the end, goodbye, dr. o'deorain"


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's it folks! with this epilogue the story is officially finished. i hope you all enjoyed it, because i certainly enjoyed writing it, and as the first multichapter i've ever finished and posted, this has been a great experience that i hope to follow up on it with more soon : )
> 
> a huge thank you to everyone who has commented, left kudos, bookmarked or even just read this story. all of you are the reason i want to keep going. it's been such a gift to see the positive response my work has received. 
> 
> also, thank you so much to the light of my life audrey aka sapphicartsandwriting, who beta'd the first few chapters and was a great encouragement throughout the writing process. they mainly write for x-men these days but have some really cute som.va fic up if you're into that, they're really great and you should check their work out! 
> 
> and lastly, thank you to my dear friend rosi aka cykelops, who helped me with the spanish in this and made sure sombra wasn't speaking gibberish! rosi has written an absolutely beautiful spiderbyte ficlet, "glitch", which is some of my favorite fic on this ship ever, you should really check it out. 
> 
> i love you all. i hope you enjoy this last small piece of fluff from me to you before we officially close the curtain! 
> 
> (by the way, a great soundtrack to this chapter is enjoy the silence by depeche mode. if you're more into heavy music, i really recommend lacuna coil's cover, but both versions work)

„What the hell happened to you?“ 

Lilli Wagner was evidently doing her very best not to let her incredulousness show too much in her voice, but she wasn‘t doing a very good job of it. Sombra couldn‘t exactly blame her. After all, she had just shown up in her shop for the first time in eight years, without so much as calling ahead, with deep wounds all over her back and half of the cybernetics Lilli had so carefully installed torn out. At least the cyberneticist hadn‘t seemed too shocked by Amélie‘s appearance. Her shop was situated close to the Reeperbahn, the pulsating heart of Hamburg‘s red-light district, maybe the most infamous one in Europe at this time. Here, she had probably seen creatures that were a lot stranger than the blue Frenchwoman. 

„Long story.“ 

Sombra grimaced as the cold metal of Lilli‘s robotic arm pressed into what was left of her skin. Alternately to the hand prosthetic she used in day-to-day life, she could plug the tools she used for her work directly into the stump. Right now, she was attempting to pluck out the shards Moira‘s rough handiwork had left. 

„Really?“, the German woman deadpanned, „I wouldn‘t have guessed. Spill the beans, Sombra.“

Sombra sighed. „I was attacked by an evil scientist who tried to turn me into a brainwashed slave. That good enough for you?“

Lilli was silent for a moment. „If it were anyone else telling me this story, I would not believe them, but with you, nothing‘s really off the table.“

„I‘m taking that as a compliment.“

The hum of Lilli‘s instruments almost reminded her of the drill Moira had used on her. It made an uncomfortable feeling settle in the pit of her stomach, but she swallowed it down. The tweezers poking around in her raw flesh hurt even with the local anesthetic she‘d been given, but it was nothing compared to the pain of the implants being ripped out. Sombra tried not to think about the fact that only a few hours had passed since. It felt like the world around her had changed in such major ways that it was impossible to process that it was still the same day, although the digital clock next to the stretcher Sombra lay on was close to hitting 0000 hours. 

„There‘s a lot of splinters in here“, Lilli said. The frown was audible in her slightly accented voice even though Sombra was lying face down and couldn‘t see her actual expression. „Whoever did this to you didn‘t care at all about how much damage they were doing, to you or your implants.“

Sombra scoffed. „I sort of got that impression when she drilled holes into my back without an anesthetic.“ 

„ _Igitt_. That sounds... not good.“ 

„No shit.“

Amélie, who was sitting on a foldable plastic chair on the opposite side of the stretcher, had been silent until this moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was very quiet, but still filled the room easily even over the buzzing of Lilli‘s machines.

„Can you fix them? Her implants?“ 

Lilli plucked out another splinter. 

„Hopefully.“

„Hopefully is not good enough.“ Amélie‘s voice had gained some edge. Lilli‘s arm halted.

„Listen, _Zicke_ , you two came here asking me for help and considering I have a sharp needle buried in your girlfriend‘s back right now, you might want to consider consider quitting-“

„Shut up, both of you“, Sombra interrupted her, suddenly glad Lilli and Amélie couldn‘t see her face. She was fairly sure her cheeks were bright red. „Lilli saved my ass once, she‘ll do it again.“

She reached out and covered Amélie‘s hands, folded in her lap, with her own, acutely aware that she wasn‘t exactly contradicting Lilli‘s belief that Amélie was her girlfriend.

Then again, maybe she didn‘t have to contradict it. Amélie, for one, didn‘t seem too fazed by the statement. If at all, she looked worried, but not about being mistaken for anyone‘s significant other. She immediately grasped Sombra‘s hand, lacing her cold fingers through the hacker‘s warm ones. Sombra gave her a slightly lopsided smile, and suddenly, Lilli‘s tweezers didn‘t hurt so much anymore. 

She held Amélie‘s hand throughout the rest of the procedure, slightly squeezing it whenever the pain increased. Slowly, Amélie‘s ever-present frown began to loosen up. Sombra knew she still didn‘t fully trust Lilli, but that Sombra did seemed to be enough for Amélie. At least for the time being. 

By the time Lilli had plucked the last shard out of Sombra‘s back, Amélie‘s skin had almost warmed up beneath her own. Somehow, she managed to hold onto her hand even as she sat up slowly, her back aching terribly. The anesthetic was wearing off little by little. 

She cast a glance at the flat bowl that held the bloody fragments on the table next to the stretcher. There really were a lot of them. Moira had to have damaged even more than Sombra had thought.

„That‘s it?“

Lilli nodded. „The splinters are out. Normally, I‘d tell you to let your back heal up properly before I install a replacement, but knowing you...“

„No.“ Sombra didn‘t even let her finish the sentence. „I need the implants back online as soon as possible. I can‘t even access my data like this, let alone monitor what happened at...“

Her voice trailed off, and she exchanged a glance with Amélie. The spider seemed to understand, though Lilli was obviously oblivious.

„What happened where?“ 

„Not relevant“, Sombra waved her off. Lilli scowled, but was smart enough not to ask any further. Sombra had never let her in on everything she did, but she _had_ installed all of Sombra‘s hardware. There was only so much she could keep secret from the woman who had built a major part of her brain. 

„How soon can you have the replacements up?“, Sombra demanded. Lilli sighed, running her right hand - the one still made of flesh, pale knuckles covered in tattoos - through her bleached white hair. 

„If you‘re willing to spend the better part of 24 hours on that stretcher, by tomorrow night.“ 

Sombra looked at Amélie again. „Are you okay with waiting that long?“ 

Amélie just shrugged. „I am okay as long as you will be okay.“ 

„ _Gott im Himmel_ “, Lilli groaned, „you two are really sappy, do you know that?“ 

Sombra blushed again and tried in vain to hide it. There was a small smirk tugging at the edges of Amélie‘s mouth, and Sombra‘s heart leapt in her chest a little.

Maybe they would be alright after all.

\----------------

It was a day and a half later in the early hours of the morning, and Sombra and Amélie were lying on the small bed in a cheap motel room in the heart of Hamburg. There were neon lights pulsating from the gigantic advertisements outside, falling inside through the single window. They were the only thing that illuminated the small room, but it was alright. It was everything they needed.

Sombra‘s head was nestled into the crook of Amélie‘s neck, the blue woman‘s arms around her, the sheets haphazardly tugged over them. The only sounds came from the city, bustling and wide awake as them, accompanied by Sombra‘s steady breaths and Amélie‘s slower ones. 

The new implants on Sombra‘s back glowed softly in the dark. They were almost identical to the old ones, though a little more advanced (Lilli hadn‘t been able to resist the temptation of installing some updates). The wounds around them had been stitched up, the skin still angry and red. Sombra had taken another painkiller a while back. It would be hours before it would wear off. 

Everything was alright. For the first time in years, everything was alright.

Amélie‘s voice was barely louder than a whisper, but Sombra heard her clearly when she spoke after an eternity of silence that felt like bliss instead of a burden.

„What now, _mon cœur?_ “ 

Sombra shrugged with one shoulder and stifled a yawn. „What do you wanna do?“ 

Amélie was silent for a while before she answered. „Make sure nothing is left of Talon. And then... then... just exist for a while, I think. Quietly.“ 

„Just exist, huh?“ Sombra smiled. „Sounds like it could be nice, _araña._ “ 

She understood what Amélie was saying. After years of existing only for one purpose, she wanted time to find herself again. To come to terms with what had happened to her, and to find something new, maybe, that she wanted to live for, now that it would never be Talon again. 

The idea of playing house had never appealed to Sombra, but the thought of doing it with Amélie by her side didn‘t seem so bad suddenly. Maybe, just maybe, she could use the time off too. Too much had happened during the last few months. She had escaped one life or death situation too many. 

Peace and quiet weren‘t her thing, but maybe she could get used to it. Just this once. 

„But...“

The reminder came to her suddenly and in a most unwelcome fashion. She was tempted to brush it off, but she knew they‘d have to deal with it sooner or later. 

„We‘ll have to do something about the treatment problem. Without your injections...“

She didn‘t dare finish the thought. Her fingers were tracing patterns over Amélie‘s collarbone absentmindedly. If she was careful, she could feel her slow heartbeat beneath her fingertips.

A soft sigh escaped Amélie‘s lips. „I know. Maybe we should not have left in such a hurry, we could have taken some of the serum.“

Sombra shook her head lightly. „No time for that, _amor_. It was now or never. We made the right decision.“

Amélie was silent for a few moments. Sombra could feel her lightly stroking her hair, a habit she‘d developed over the course of the past several months, and one the hacker had come to enjoy tremendously.

„And Angela?“

Sombra almost flinched at the mention of the doctor. Amélie seemed to sense her uneasiness.

„I know you do not like the idea, but she may well be the best hope we have.“

Sombra swallowed down a snide remark. She didn‘t feel like having an argument. She‘d had too many of them with too many people in recent times. 

„I know her work, _chérie_. If anyone can undo what Talon did to me, it‘s her.“

Amélie sounded so certain. In a way, Sombra had to admire how much faith she still had in Ziegler and her abilities even after everything that had happened. And it wasn‘t like she was wrong. From everything Sombra knew about the Swiss doctor, she was one of the, if not the single best in her field. There were rumors about her being able to bring even the dead back to life. 

Maybe, just maybe...

„Do you really think we can trust her?“, she asked.

„If there is anything left in her of the woman I knew, then yes. I believe we can trust her. Angela would never turn anyone away who needed her help.“

It was hard to object to anything Amélie said when it was so obvious how much she believed it. Then again, maybe she was right. Maybe it was Sombra who had to swallow down her distrustfulness just this once.

Amélie had put her life in her hands with no guarantee that she wouldn‘t waste it. That was more faith than Sombra deserved, and now it was time to return it.

„It‘s risky“, she weakly argued, but there was no real intention behind it.

„Isn‘t everything?“ 

Sombra recognized the words immediately. She smiled against Amélie‘s neck. „Hey, spider, that‘s my line.“ 

„Mine now.“

Sombra shifted until she was facing the other woman, laid a hand against her cold blue cheek and leaned up to kiss her. Amélie‘s lips were cold and the softest thing she had ever felt, and when she kissed Sombra back, a little bit of the world around them fell away.

It was a gentle ruination, the way Amélie held her, with hands so soft like she was afraid Sombra would break beneath them. 

It was beautiful. 

Sombra could hardly believe how beautiful it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaaaaaaand roll credits! nothing better than a good old-fashioned ending title drop. (i actually came up with the title only as i was writing the epilogue, so that's where that comes from!)
> 
> translations:
> 
> "igitt" - "ew"
> 
> "zicke" - the official translation is "bitch" but as an actual german person i'd say it's much less strong, it's a harmless insult for a girl who's being sort of stuck up or confrontational
> 
> "gott im himmel" - "lord in heaven", used like "oh my god" 
> 
> "mon cœur" - "my heart"
> 
> (i really enjoyed working the german stuff into this chapter, as well as the stuff on hamburg and the reeperbahn. we don't really know where sombra's cyberneticist is from her origin story, so i just went with someplace i knew well. i really enjoyed writing lilli, let me know if you feel the same maybe?)


End file.
